15th N.I.C.E. Festival in NY!

The N.I.C.E. Festival (New Italian Cinema Event) is celebrating its 15th Anniversary this year with yet again another group of eclectic Italian films. N.I.C.E. has helped nurture new Italian filmmakers from obscurity to world wide recognition boosting a list of filmmakers including Marco Risi, Antonio Capuano, Matteo Garrone, Pappi Corsicato, and Silvio Soldini, among others. N.I.C.E. holds events in New York, San Francisco, Moscow, Amsterdam and soon in Philadelphia. This year’s festival is filled with diversity and these filmmakers surely will become known in Italy and abroad in the coming years. A short film plays with each film. For more information regarding all of these films and the organization that runs the event go to: www.nicefestival.org. The independent film theater the Quad Cinema @ 34 West 13th Avenue in New York City is the venue to see all of these films.

Saimir (Saimir)
Year: 2004. Running Time: 88’

Edmond and Saimir are a father and his fifteen-year-old son who have migrated to Italy from Albania. The two are very close, even though they find it hard to communicate. From the squalid outskirts of coastal towns and nomad campsites to the meanness of the provinces, the father struggles to provide a decent future for himself and his son. However, to do this he continues to use the only means he is familiar with – trafficking in illegal immigrants from Eastern Europe. Despite his efforts, Saimir seems incapable of creating a one-to-one relationship with his Italian peers and with Michela, the girl he is in love with and who almost seems to be afraid of him. When he discovers that his father has become involved with an Albanian mobster running an underage prostitution ring, the boy reacts violently. He thus sets out on a voyage of personal redemption.

Nov. 16 – 6:30pm, Nov. 17 – 4:00pm & 9:00pm (Short Film: Post It)

I Truly Respect You (Volevo Solo Dormirle Addosso)
Year: 2004. Running Time: 98’

Marco Pressi is a thirty-year-old manager working for the multi-national company, MTI. One day, his bosses suggest that he changes his position: he has to deal with personnel cut-backs. Marco accepts and starts a race against time. He has to make new alliances and betray old friends. He soon realizes that the race he is involved in has got two prizes: the first is survival, the second his own working death. He cannot get help from Laura, his “almost girlfriend”. He cannot get help from those who decided to resist against the company. He cannot get help from a girl called Angelique that seems the incarnation of his recurrent dreams. He cannot get help from Jean Claude, a powerful manager from the MTI on assignment in Italy. But Marco Pressi won’t give up and manages to achieve his target by using all his resources, and in his own way.

Nov. 11 – 6:30pm, Nov. 12 – 4:00pm, Nov. 14 – 9:pm (Short Film: Come Ieri)

The Silence of the Skylark (Il Silenzio Dell’Allodola)
Year: 2004. Running Time: 96’

The Silence of Skylark is the story of Bobby Sands, a young Irish poet who lived in the Catholic quarters of Belfast and like many young republicans of that period, the 70’s, had contacts with the IRA, the armed element of Sinn Fein. Similarly to others of this group, he was arrested and obliged to confess – with a gun pointed at his forehead – a crime he had not committed. He died in 1981 at the age of 27, following a hunger strike that lasted 66 days, to protest against the conditions of political prisoners in the United Kingdom. The story is that of a modern martyr. It demonstrates that even in the darkest, most extreme conditions of stifled freedom, a man can go on making choices, and thus continue to feel like a human being.

Nov. 13 – 4:00pm, Nov. 15 – 9:00pm, Nov. 17 – 6:30pm (Short Film: Leo e Sandra)

You Must Be the Wolf (Tu Devi Essere Il Lupo)
Year: 2004. Running Time: 95’

Valentina is fifteen years old: desires, doubts, questions. She lost her mother and her life revolves around her father Carlo, a young taxi driver with an obsession for photography. There’s a strong relationship between the two, happy but exclusive to the point of excluding others. Until now all this was enough for her, but Valentina is growing and the instinct to escape is stronger than her fear of remaining alone. In Lisbon there’s a woman who works in a puppet theatre; a woman accustomed to living alone and maybe only now ready to open herself to the idea of a co-habitation and to the possibility of having a child. But when this possibility becomes real, the woman gets away. One day Carlo receives a letter from Portugal…

Nov. 15 – 6:30, Nov. 16 -4:00pm & 9:00pm (Short Film: LAlibi)

Unnatural (Contronatura)
Year: 2004. Running Time: 110’

Giacomo is a son of the wilderness, a natural element and an element of nature at the same time. He is an uncontrollable entity moving in a timeless world. Francesca is attracted to Giacomo and to what he personifies. Fully aware of the risk she is taking, she is however still ready to play her cards to the very end. Francesca’s character is in full evolution and we perceive her actual physical mutation as the story unfolds. Although completely extraneous to Giacomo’s world, her real desire to become familiar with it and enter it succeeds in creating a perfect symbiosis with him and what he represents, even though the man and woman belong to opposite seasons: he to autumn and she to springtime.

Nov. 12 – 9:00pm, Nov. 13 – 6:30pm, Nov. 14 – 4:00pm (Short Film: Chi?)

Facts of Banda Magliana (I Fatti Della Banda Della Magliana)
Year: 2004. Running Time: 85’

The subject is loosely inspired by the criminal activities of the “The Gang of the Magliana” over fifteen years (1975-1991) and based on the Acts of the Courts of Rome. The confession of a “collaborating witness” – Luciano Amodio, called “Riccetto” (Maurizio Abbatino, in the actual story) tells of the growing criminality of the main chararacters and of the formation of the gang (1977), of the years of their maximum power (1980-86) and of those of their final decadence (1987-91). The confession takes place in a highly guarded court room in front of a fictional magistrate. While recalling past occurrences, Riccetto summons the main protagonists of those crimes, whether alive or not and urges them to declare their responsibility and their involvement in those crimes. But once together they can’t help falling into contradictions. They blame each other for their deaths and in so doing they tell us the main stages of their criminal activities. Each character reveals his “own” truth with the only purpose to reduce his responsibility and put a greater burden on the others.

Nov. 11 – 6:00pm, Nov. 14 – 6:30pm, Nov. 15 – 4:00pm (Short Film: Radiopanico)

Gas (Gas)
Year: 2005. Running Time: 100’

Constructed like a thriller, Gas takes the viewer into a world that is cruel yet at same time both touching and poetic. From unstable backgrounds, in which family no longer has any value but is just a duty, six young people, between twenty and thirty, bonded through their common feelings of disenchantment, are veritable time-bombs, and we see them gradually sink into a moral quagmire. They look for a victim and take him into an abandoned building to vent their confused feelings on him through a series of sadistic games. Luca, the main protagonist, however is different and he joined the group only recently with a very special purpose which is revenge. But why and on whom…

Nov. 11- 4:00pm, Nov. 12 – 6:30pm, Nov. 13 – 9:00pm (Short Film: Autoritratto)