Giornate degli Autori presents a map of cinema made up of films coming from many of the world's countries, with stories that take on personal lives or tackle geopolitics, using fiction or reconstructing reality. 

The identity of the individual characters in the films tapped for our 18th edition often reflects those socio-historical issues that are the backdrop to many stories in 2021. Indeed, films about social problems, politics or private struggles all merge to create a single universe that goes beyond genres and geography. The momentous themes splashed on the front pages are not the subjects of these stories but are often the direct consequence of them, and this is a sign that politics and current events are the lifeblood (toxic, at times) of contemporary dramas. There are no war stories per se; there is the background to all wars. On the screen we see a fast-changing society seeking to satisfy that very human need to know what side to take. Fortunately, cinema challenges the status quo, and identity is fragmented so it may be analyzed and reconstructed in this new social order.

"The men and women who are depicted in the films selected for Giornate this year," explains Gaia Furrer, "all seem to harbor a terrible uncertainty that springs from the most political question of them all: where do I call home? A Moroccan girl living in Naples; a violent, dissatisfied Brazilian cop; a Syrian doctor plagued by doubts, and a young Muslim woman living in Paris they are all trying to find their place in the world. They want something but often don't know what; they wait, for an unlikely return. In these films, politics sweeps in with a long shot, while the close-ups are of people with their doubts and frustrations: people who form a geography, the borders of which lie beyond the wishes and decisions of individuals."

"From the films of Elio Petri to those of Ken Loach, including those of Marco Bellocchio or Clint Eastwood the director, and even Chloé Zhao's recent documentary approaches, the cinema of social or political engagement has evolved to the point of no longer addressing major political crises, but the stories of people whose baggage is full of universal questions instead," declares Giorgio Gosetti. "History is now being made in Afghanistan, and in the process, cinema investigates all the backdrops to the historical event, such as immigration, integration, tradition, and personal and social evolution."

Californie, the Italian film in competition, directed by Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman and set in a hinterland of Naples unaffected by the dealings of the Camorra, drug-lords or gangsters, is about the constant striving for integration that never seems to materialize. When the life of the girl who is the main character begins to acquire something of a reassuring routine, all the assumptions that underlie the new world she was creating collapse (premiering on September 3rd at 17:15).

You Resemble Me (a Franco-Egyptian and U.S. co-production, in competition) also feeds on this same search for normality and a sense of belonging, to achieve which the lead character approaches a religion and its culture without really embracing its spirit. She will wind up being marginalized, an unknowing pawn of history. The film is "a kaleidoscope of splintered identities and fractured dreams," as the Egyptian-American filmmaker Dina Amer describes it, on her feature directorial debut. The film premieres on September 8th, at 16:15.

Another title in competition comes from Brazil. Despite being an LGTBQ+ melodrama, it contains all the toxic macho and homophobic culture and all the hidden truths of the country under Bolsonaro. Directed by Aly Muritiba, Private Desert is also about finding oneself; its script draws on political attitudes and issues concerning sexual identity, but more importantly, concerning everyone's right to personal liberty. The same thing is going on in Imaculat, the Romanian film by Monica Stan and George Chiper-Lillemark. It's essentially about the quest for a personal dimension, yet also draws on the social dynamics of many places in the world, recreated in the closed setting of a single room. A rehab facility, in fact, for drug addicts, in which the protagonist alter ego of Monica Stan who wrote the film based on her own life story finds herself in a corner, hemmed in by the men she depends on, from her first love (in absentia), who turned her on to drugs, to the men who sexually harass her and challenge her, all the way to those who decide to protect her.

"The Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967 is an event that has been totally forgotten," says Ameer Fakher Eldin, director of The Stranger, an intimate story about a doctor who is an alcoholic. The film zooms in on his personal desperation as the bombs can be heard in the distance; it's a full immersion in the bewilderment of those who live in occupied territories, torn between personal dilemmas and the faded identity of a non-place.

The Israeli documentarian Michale Boganim, who studied under Jean Rouch at the Sorbonne in Paris, and made her own feature directorial debut at Venice with Land of Oblivion (2011), now brings her new film to Giornate. The Forgotten Ones delves into the genesis of the State of Israel a story her own father told her, as a member of the local Black Panthers in which Jews coming from Arab countries face systematic discrimination. An imaginary border shuts them out of that great promise made by international politics in 1948, with the creation of Israel. The film mixes new and archival footage and, as its director puts it, "this road movie is a journey of exploration into the dusty periphery of a nation."

Cinema meets historiography when the consequences of political policies from nearly eighty years ago are immortalized before the event that a new "archive film" makes us look long and hard at. The occasion is Three minutes - A Lengthening (one of our Special Events): three minutes of moving images filmed in 1938, in a Jewish village in Poland that would be exterminated by the Nazis just a few years later. The only images left of this place, they now enable us to reread history. The film, executive-produced by Steve McQueen, among others, is directed by Bianca Stigter, a historian and documentary filmmaker who bucks the contemporary trend of watching images in a heartbeat and has us watch those three minutes of film in a circular fashion, to catch the details we barely stop to appreciate any more, at the pace we are used to.

Sabina Guzzanti is back in the director's chair for Spin Time. Che fatica la democrazia!, or "the poor as you have never seen them before," in Guzzanti's own words. The film looks at a 17,000- square-meter building occupied by squatters, Rome's most multi-ethnic community center, a political and social work in progress. The film will bow as one of our Venetian Nights titles, in collaboration with Isola Edipo.

Unfinished by Federica Di Giacomo one of Giornate's Special Events also looks at a dream building, but how it crumbles instead, and with it the aspirations and political ideals of the generation in its 50's today. And there's geopolitics behind Hugo in Argentina by Swiss filmmaker Stefano Knuchel (being showcased at Venetian Nights, in collaboration with Isola Edipo). He takes us back to the first half of the last century, when his own family moved to Ethiopia under Italy's fascist regime, long before Knuchel went to work in Argentina for several years and was touched to meet his fellow Italians proffering their partisan fighter ID from the war, and some of them can be heard on speaker over the course of the documentary.

Last but not least, Giornate's opening film (on September 1st at 17:00 in Sala Perla): Shen Kong (in competition) is a film for the present age, a pure representation of what we are today, how we feel, and what we aspire to be. This debut by filmmaker Chen Guan comes to us from Macao. It's a film about the freedom, desire and will to stand up to the solitude and desolation of the pandemic that is ongoing; a film that wishes to believe in ideologies and salvation and looks for normality even in places it seems impossible to find.