Lecce 2008

The Festival of European Cinema, held in the historical town of Lecce in the south of Apulia, is one of the small festivals with mostly regional visitors. In competition, for which the FIPRESCI prize is also given, ten films were shown this year many of which had been shown at other festivals and won prizes before.

A number of side programs and conferences complete the festival. In the past, the most important, were the retrospectives devoted to Krzysztof Zanussi, Carlos Saura, Otar Iosseliani, Jules Dassin, Andrzej Wajda, Edgar Reitz, Andrej Tarkovski and Theo Angelopoulos, and to the Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov this year. (Thomas Rothschild)

European Cinema Festival, Lecce, April 15-20, 2008, www.europecinefestival.org
FIPRESCI Prize: Hope (Nadzieja) by Stanislaw Mucha (Poland 2007). Details

Reports:

Angels Do Have Sex. Lidia Maslova discusses the various interpretations of the meaning of the title Hope, a Polish films directed by Stanislaw Mucha, and finds some answers intriguing and some obvious.
Wild World. Thomas Rothschild is depressed by the lack of hope in many films of today and the current vogue in cinema of violence for its own sake, for which he gives examples from several films in competition.
At Home Among Strangers. Sauro Borelli revisits and reassesses the work of Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov, to whom the Lecce Festival paid homage with a retrospective.

top