“The golden age is before us, not behind us”. (William Shakespeare)
It’s easy to look back at directors like Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini and see the greatness; it’s harder when you are in the midst of it. Four Italian directors are making their mark today, and don’t seem to want to be the new Federico Fellini so much as do it their own way. Like it or not, they are changing the face of Italian cinema and we can mourn the death of the “golden era”, or we can look to the future that they are creating for us.
Paolo Sorrentino, Francesco Munzi, Matteo Garrone, and Nanni Moretti battled for the top cinema awards this year, and “they’re all winners”;more importantly, they are all staring in the face of greatness and are the directors of our time.
Paolo Sorrentino’s cinematic eye is like no other’s, and I can’t even blame those who don’t get him. Is he a clever genius or just a flaky exhibitionist?
I’m going with genius. He won the Academy Award for The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza), and affected everybody that saw it in one way or another with his latest Youth (La Giovinezza), which premiered at Cannes and has gone on to win buckets of awards.
Francesco Munzi may be the least known of the four but is rapidly making a name for himself with his multiple award-winning Black Souls (Anime Nere), the mafia movie, that he says is by no means just a mafia movie. He won Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Film at the David Di Donatello Awards and went on to win Golden Globes, Nastri D’Argentos, and prizes at countless film festivals.
READ MY INTERVIEW WITH FRANCESCO MUNZI
As for Nanni Moretti, he’s been around a good long time and doing very well having been nominated and won awards too numerous to mention for films spanning the past 5 decades. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel that he’s reaching a stride yet unseen, and his latest films, including the greatly applauded and prize-winning Mia Madre (My Mother), are proof of that.
And Matteo Garrone, best known for the iconic mafia movie Gomorrah, has come up with an English language movie that America can’t wait to see, Tale of Tales (Il Racconto Dei Racconti), a film that competed at Cannes and has been sold in more than 40 countries including the USA. This gorgeous film is a collection of fairy tales with no punches pulled from Neapolitan author Giambattista Basile.
I Love Italian Everything 