Tomorrow the curtain will be raised on the 56th Pesaro Film Festival, that will run until August 29. This is an edition as special as the times we are living in, so the Festival has transformed to welcome cinema in all its components. For example, open-air venues have multiplied, and there are three of them: Piazza del Popolo, the beach resort Bagni Agata, and the castle of Rocca Costanza. The contents of the Festival have changed too, because a little revolution has shaken up the main section: the Pesaro Nuovo Cinema Competition - Premio Lino Miccichè, which this year opens to films of all genres and durations, made by emerging or well-known directors. Introduced by Virginia Mori’s poster and by the opening theme of Cristiano Carloni and Stefano Franceschetti, the festival offers other gems throughout its sections, such as a meeting in Piazza del Popolo with Oliver Stone (August 25); the Special Event, dedicated to the doyen of Italian cinema, Giuliano Montaldo; a focus on animation film director Donato Sansone; The Blues Brothers in 4K to inaugurate Cinema in the Square, while Cinema at the Beach features an homage to Fellini and Sordi; a commemoration of Italian film director Corso Salani; a selection of Italian animated shorts; and the ‘cinephile breakfasts’ at Cinema Astra.

ACCESS INSTRUCTIONS

The Pesaro Film Festival has been a free space of dialogue and discussion for 55 years, and it continues to do so this year too; but to accommodate the audience in compliance with safety standards, the viewers will be required to book their seats at Teatro Sperimentale and Cinema in the Square through the ticketing platform DICE (http://dice.fm/PesaroFilmFest).

For the afternoon screenings at Teatro Sperimentale only, the reservation will be valid throughout the whole afternoon, and will allow access at any moment.

As regards Cinema at the Beach, access is usually reserved for the restaurant customers at the beach resort Bagni Agata. To reserve your seat, you’ll contact the Bagni Agata restaurant at the mobile phone +39 329 2923927 or on their Messenger at facebook.com/BagniAgata/. Access is guaranteed within the limits of social distancing and is subject to availability.

The gallery spazio bianco does not require any reservation: you only have to register on the spot, leaving your name and contact information. Access is guaranteed within the limits of social distancing and is subject to availability, 5 people at a time.

For the screenings at Rocca Costanza, please contact directly the arena at: www.giomettirealestatecinema.it/cinema/cinema-in-rocca/programmazione.

THE PROGRAMME

The 56th edition will be launched tomorrow August 22 on the notes of Mirko Bertuccioli, the musician and co-founder (with Vittorio Ondedei) of the Pesaro band The Camillas who died prematurely of Covid-19. To him is dedicated the big concert Luccichini Dappertutto in Piazza del Popolo at 9.15pm – the tickets for which were sold out in less than 24 hours. In memory of Mirko, his songs will be played by some of the most outstanding musicians of the Italian independent scene, including Calcutta, Maria Antonietta, Lo Stato Sociale, Pop X, The Bluebeaters, Colombre, Giacomo Laser and Gioacchino Turù, Auroro Borealo, Duo Bucolico, and Brace, accompanied by the whole Camillas family (Ruben, Michael, and Theodore). At the same time, another open-air venue of the Festival will be inaugurated, that is, Bagni Agata for Cinema at the Beach (every night at 9 pm). Here, we pay homage to two titans of Italian cinema – Federico Fellini and Alberto Sordi – on the centenary of their birth with a schedule of screenings that begins precisely with The White Sheikh, i.e., Fellini’s debut in film-making and one of the most notorious roles of Sordi. Saturday will also mark the beginning of the collaboration with the suggestive arena of Rocca Costanza, one of the symbolic venues of Pesaro, which will offer the Piazza concert in live streaming. Also from tomorrow onwards, for the whole duration of the Festival, the gallery spazio bianco (Via Zongo 45) will host the installation Trilogy of the Wanderers, a sort of video-photographic atlas made by Giorgiomaria Cornelio and Lucamatteo Rossi (Navegasión) and curated by Mauro Santini.

On Sunday 23, 9.15pm, Piazza del Popolo will host its first screening of this edition, a big event in collaboration with Universal Pictures International Italy, i.e., the projection of the 4K, Ultra HD version of The Blues Brothers forty years from its release. A not-to-be-missed opportunity to recite memorable lines from this modern classic and to sing along the notes of the black-hatted, black-sunglassed brothers. Cinema at the Beach, at 9 pm, will screen the second collaboration of Fellini and Sordi, the always super-topical bittersweet portrayal of life in the (Rimini) province, I Vitelloni. At the same time, Rocca Costanza at 9 pm inaugurates the Special Event on Italian film with the restored version of Pigeon Shoot (1961), Giuliano Montaldo’s debut, courtesy of Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – National Film Archive. Here, the WWII partisan fight is seen from the point of view of the Italian Social Republic troops, between fanaticism and disenchantment.

Monday 24 will see another debut (at 4 pm), the Competition Pesaro Nuovo Cinema. This year, the main competition is open to all kinds of genres and formats and is not restricted to first-time directors, under the sign of research and experimentation. The 19 works in competition will be judged by a jury composed of actress Ingrid Caven, DOP Renato Berta, actor and director Vinicio Marchioni, and animation film wizard Virgilio Villoresi. All the films in competition are screened in the auditorium of Teatro Sperimentale, beginning with the first work, a feature documentary by French director Eléonore Weber, There will be no more nights, which processes images of propaganda shot by the troops in Afghanistan and Syria to elaborate an original reflection on gaze. On the same day, the Teatro Sperimentale programme includes the first Italian film in competition, Smarginature, in which director Gabriele Di Munzio tells the story of an unexpected pregnancy in the historic centre of Naples during the lockdown; Paulo Abreu’s What is not seen, a Portuguese documentary shot in the Azores to become a reflection on art; the medium-length Subject to Review by US film-maker Theo Anthony, an impassioned discussion of the use of Hawk-Eye, a replay system, in professional tennis. At 9 pm, Teatro Sperimentale switches to the Italian Special Event with one of the classics of Giuliano Montaldo, i.e., Sacco & Vanzetti (1971), an exemplary reconstruction of the outrageous trial against the two Italian anarchists in the US (and winner of the Cannes Award for best actor). Cinema in the Square at 9 pm offers the inventive animation musical The Nose or The Conspiracy of Mavericks, for which its director, Russian master Andrey Khrzhanovsky, took inspiration from Gogol’s short story and Shostakovich’s opera with the same name using mixed media and hand-made animation techniques. Also an homage to all pioneers in art, the film will be live-streamed on MyMovies. Cinema at the Beach features Antonio Pietrangeli’s The Bachelor, in which an unleashed Alberto Sordi plays a confirmed bachelor, while Rocca Costanza world-premieres two special screenings, the short Quarantine Path by Pesaro-based director Davide Lomma, and the sentimental comedy Neolovismo, directed by and starring Mike Bruce and Susanna della Sala (with the presence of the latter).