The St. Louis Italian Film Festival, sponsored by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Chicago, WUSTL’s Program in Film and Media Studies in Arts & Sciences and the Italian Club of St. Louis, will feature the St. Louis premiere of three recent Italian films.
La Destinazione (The Destination) by Piero Sanna will be shown today; La Meglio Gioventù (The Best of Youth) by Marco Tullio Giordana will be shown in two parts on March 25 and 26; and Il Cuore Altrove (Incantato) by Pupi Avati will be shown April 1.
All films will be presented in 35mm format in Italian with English subtitles at 7:30 p.m. in Brown Hall, Room 100.
Today’s screening of La Destinazione is a rare opportunity for St. Louisans to meet director Piero Sanna, who will introduce his film and hold a brief question-and-answer session after the screening.
Sanna will come to St. Louis after presenting his film at Chicago’s European Union Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
La Destinazione focuses on a young man who enlists in the state police and is posted to the island of Sardinia, where he encounters a society that seems primitive, ruled by unfamiliar traditions and closed to outsiders. Sanna captures the rugged beauty of Sardinia and a powerful sense of what it feels like to be a stranger in a strange land.
La Meglio Gioventù was an enormous box-office and critical success in Italy. It follows the lives of two brothers who take diverging paths through 40 years of recent Italian history, one becoming an embittered policeman, the other a politically active psychiatrist.
Il Cuore Altrove, a poignant tale set in Rome and Bologna during the 1920s, tells the story of a timid 35-year-old bachelor who comes from a long line of tailors. He meets an exuberant, beautiful young blind girl with whom he falls hopelessly in love, but both sets of parents do not approve of the relationship.
Admission is free and open to the public.
For more information, call 935-4056.