IT
10/08/2019

Isola Edipo


Isola Edipo is a sidebar of the Venice Film Festival that showcases films and other cultural and artistic initiatives imbued with the values of social cooperation, respect for the environment and the individual and sustainability. Promoted by Edipo Re and Res-Int, under the aegis of the Veneto Region, the Municipality of Venice and the University of Padua Studi, the event is jointly produced by MyMovies and Kama Productions, under artistic directors Silvia Jop and Riccardo Biadene.

The centerpiece of the entire program is the institution of the Edipo Re Inclusion Award, one of the official collateral awards of the Biennale Cinema. It is bestowed on one of the films on the competitive lineup of the 76th Venice Film Festival, and assigned by a jury composed of three high-profile cultural figures (this year actress Ottavia Piccolo, filmmaker Giuseppe Piccioni and reporter Giuliano Battiston).

For the 2019 edition, Giornate degli Autori strengthens its collaboration with the organizers of Isola Edipo after joining forces the first time in 2018, for the bestowal of the Inclusion Award for lifetime achievement on director and photographer Raymond Depardon. Expanding the offerings co-curated by Isola Edipo and Giornate this year at the Venice Film Festival has the aim of creating a program of events that serves as a vital link between social realities and the arts by means of talk series and screenings of short and medium-length films that explore the connection between cinema and the other arts and also turn the focus onto the restoration of film classics.

The high point of this joint initiative will be the awards ceremony for the Edipo Re Inclusion Award for Lifetime Achievement, bestowed this year on the German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta on September 4 at 7:30 pm at Isola Edipo (Riva Corinto 1, on the Lido). On September 5 at 5:30 pm, the director will hold a masterclass at the Villa degli Autori. Both of these events will be followed by screenings of two of von Trotta's films at the Sala Astra on the Lido.

Thanks to a collaboration with the Reading Bloom, the Lido is hosting the Italian premieres of the restored versions (by Ross Lipman of Milestone) of two films by Billy Woodberry, one of the leading exponents of African-American independent film and a member of the movement L.A. Rebellion. The coming-of-age tale told in the short film The pocketbook will be screened at Isola Edipo on September 1 at 10:30 pm, while the feature film Bless Their Little Hearts, written by Charles Burnett and offering an intense portrayal of African-American life in the 1980s, will be screened at the Villa degli Autori on September 2 at 10 pm.

There will also be a screening of the short film Altrove, la terra del fuoco (Isola Edipo, September 1 at 9 pm) directed by Esmeralda Calabria and Silvia Jop, to the music of the Têtes de Bois, performing live for the occasion. The film springs from a roll of 16mm film that survived over sixty years: visual notes by the Venetian author and adventurer Alberto Ongaro and comics artist Ivo Pavone on their 1954 journey to Tierra del Fuego to make a documentary about the last Gold Rush, after a sojourn in Argentina with Hugo Pratt and Mario Faustinelli to lay the groundwork for the epic history of international comics.

After touring Italy thanks to a collaboration between PSM and Archivio Mambor, the film Mambor, a documentary by Gianna Mazzini, comes to the Venice Film Festival. Based on an unpublished story of the life and works of Renato Mambor, an artist who belonged to the Scuola Romana di Piazza del Popolo, the film includes interviews with actor Fabrizio Gifuni, author Emanuele Trevi, the musician Andrea Satta and the poet Stefano Dal Bianco (Isola Edipo, September 2 at 9 pm).

The Isola Edipo program wraps up with the Italian premiere of the essay film 13, a ludodrama about Walter Benjamin by Canadian filmmaker Carlos Ferrand. From 1933 to 1940, the year of his self-inflicted death, Walter Benjamin lived in exile in Paris after fleeing Nazi Germany. The film combines archival material, contemporary footage, animated sequences and even marionettes for this film in thirteen episodes that immerses us in that fraught chapter in the life of the German philosopher and author (Sala Astra, September 5 at 6:30 pm).