समाचार

Documentarian Vittorio De Seta’s first narrative feature, Bandits of Orgosolo, builds upon several of the director’s shorts about the Sardinian region where the film is set. Featuring a cast of non-professionals, the film follows the shepherd Michele (Michele Cossu) as he and his young son, Peppeddu (Peppeddu Cuccu), end up fleeing deeper into the mountainous countryside when the father is wrongly suspected of livestock rustling and murder. With carabiners on his trail, Michele leads his child and his sheep into higher and rockier ground, and as vegetation and water become increasingly scarce, starvation rips through the flock. Eventually, and in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, circumstances force Michele into the sort of crimes of which he was initially innocent.

This overarching narrative recalls Vittorio De Sica’s seminal Bicycle Thieves. But where De Sica’s neorealist drama took a snapshot of postwar Italy’s shattered economic and moral torpor,...

Above: Pedro Costa's Horse Money

The Locarno Film Festival has announced their lineup for the 67th edition, taking place this August between the 6th and 16th. It speaks for itself, but, um, wow...

"Every film festival, be it small or large, claims to offer, if not an account of the state of things, then an updated map of the art form and the world it seeks to represent. This cartography should show both the major routes and the byways, along with essential places to visit and those that are more unusual. The Festival del film Locarno is no exception to the rule, and I think that looking through the program you will be able to distinguish the route map for this edition." — Carlo Chatrian, Artistic Director

Above: Matías Piñeiro's The Princess of France

Concorso Internazionale (Official Competition)

A Blast (Syllas Tzoumerkas, Greece/Germany/Netherlands)

Alive (Jungbum Park, South Korea)

Horse Money (Pedro Costa,...

Italian film director celebrated for his insightful short films

The film director Vittorio De Seta, who has died aged 88, was best known for his short films. A selection of these, made in Sicily and Sardinia in the 1950s, was presented by Martin Scorsese at the 2005 Tribeca film festival in New York. Scorsese described De Seta's style as that of "an anthropologist who speaks with the voice of a poet". The film historian Goffredo Fofi has hailed De Seta as an Italian director "to be remembered alongside the Rossellinis and De Sicas, the Antonionis and the Fellinis"; he also deserves to be remembered alongside the great poetic documentary makers, such as Robert Flaherty, Humphrey Jennings and Basil Wright.

De Seta was born in Palermo, Sicily, to an aristocratic landowning family from Calabria. He enrolled in the navy during the second world war and, after the armistice in 1943, refused to sign allegiance...

La Stampa is among the Italian papers and other news sources reporting on yesterday's passing of director and screenwriter Vittorio De Seta. When MoMA presented a retrospective in 2006, the curators noted that De Seta "was born into a noble Calabrian family in Palermo," studied film in Rome in the 1940s and broke "from the official cinema in the 1950s with a series of acclaimed documentaries made in Sicily, Sardinia and Calabria. Characterized by beautiful color, keen observation, and ambient soundtracks without narration, these works depict the customs of rural Italian laborers and families."

Just last month, the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival presented a series of De Seta's work: "In 1953, he worked as an assistant to French director [Jean-Paul] Le Chanois. His first documentary, Easter in Sicily, was filmed the following year. As a documentarian, he has visited villages, sulfur mines, and the remote Sardinian mountains. The Time of the Swordfish received an award at Cannes,...