There was a happy time, in which Italian cinema had a constant presence in the Argentine rooms. For idiosyncrasy, for familiarity with a language that was enjoyed on the screen through comedy or the portrait of customs and for the magnetism of a handful of names of extraordinary charisma, Italy was a usual company of Argentines on the big screen. And not only in the specialized authorized rooms. Italian cinema knew how to express each other through us through a very strong popular roots.
Buenos Aires is today crossed by a reminiscence of those days. The eleventh week of Italian cinema, which concludes on Wednesday, April 16, It brings us closer to us in recent years an advance of the film model that best represents the current film production of the Peninsula. And they live for a few more days in the local billboard with one of those classics that keeps its validity intact and especially the idea of a lasting legacy, intact over time.
An invisible line in sight and of meridian clarity when we observe it from the symbolic dimension connects to that imperishable classic, Rocco and his brothers (1960), by Luchino Visconti, with the best title scheduled in this week of Italian cinema, Diamonds (2024), Ozpetic Ferzan, whose last function will take place on Sunday, April 12, at 14, at the Cinepolis Recoleta complex.
“I wish it was, but it doesn’t correspond to me to say it,” he says with modesty Ozpetek when The nation He asks if he considers himself as heir to the Viscontian style, as an sector of Italian criticism has been pointing in recent years. It is the first time that the applauded director born in Istanbul and installed since the age of 17 in Italy visits Argentina, a country that received with great interest some of the titles of his precise and sensitive cinema to all the possible avatars of the love relationship, especially around the homosexual ties.
Visconti was always present in the memory and life of Ozpetek especially through Piero Tosi, one of the greatest European cinema dressing rooms and protagonist from that place of some peak works on the Italian screen, including The catpardo y Rocco and his brothers. “Piero was my guide for many years and my advisor. We talked almost always at midnight. He told me that mine was a different touch from any other Italian director. What is it? I don’t know. I’m ashamed to say it,” confesses Ozpetek.
Through Tosi and many other dressing rooms he worked for a decade and a half as an address assistant, Ozpetek discovered and captured all the details of light and color that are an essential part of the cinema. Diamonds It is a tribute to that world and that way of understanding artrepresented through a story that begins as a kind of reality show And then it becomes an extraordinary tribute to the way in which the Italians talk about love in the cinema with the lightness of a comedy and the passion of melodrama.
Diamonds It starts with Ozpetek himself gathering an cast of 18 actresses, the female elite of current Italian cinema (Luisa Ranieri, Jasmine Trinca and Elena Sofia Ricci, among many others) to tell them about the idea she has of making a film with them. When everything goes to fiction we are in the early 1970s in a tailoring specialized in the preparation of clothing for cinema and theater. Ambitions, conflicts, dreams, betrayals, romantic dreams and frustrated loves are displayed there while each character lives their adventures with different perspectives in a personal or family world.
“I live with emotions, and in that sense Diamonds It is the movie that came farther from everything I did. There I find what I could define as the magic of cinema, which in my case has a lot to do with what it means to share emotions. That magic is what moves you when a movie remains in your head in an inexplicable way when you return home, ”explains Ozpetek.
He also says that the original title was going to be another, A truth truth (half truth), because I wanted to play with being at the same time in real life and fiction. But advice was enough for Mina, the greatest Italian singer in the history of popular music, To change your mind. “My amadísima mine, who writes to me every day and has occupied for 15 years the place of Tosi, told me that a movie entitled A truth truth No one was going to see her. She follows me all the time, is the first to read all my scripts and my novels. There it arose Diamonds”, He adds.
That title is the plural of a word that defines, according to Ozpetek, to a whole, indestructible object. “Diamonds are women,” he adds without turns. He is excited to say that he did not expect so much success for a film that premiered in Italy on the last Christmas and was already sold to 40 countries. “What is the secret?” He asks, “I realized that people really got into this story because, as I knew later, each of us has further or closer to some relative who is dedicated to sewing.”
A segundo film de Ozpetek, I have something to tell you (Mine vagant2010) is part of the current Italian cinema week. It was another of the great successes of the Turkish origin filmmaker, which tells in a typical Commedia All’Iliana, but in current times, which lives a prototypical traditional family from the south of the Peninsula when they appear in the new generation unexpected revelations such as the recognition of a homosexual identity that until that moment remained hidden.
It is the only re -release of an armed program based on some of the most outstanding creations of recent Italian cinema. Among them they appear Gloria!De Margherita Vicario (Another of this week’s visits), a story about the discovery of art and musical talent in a Venetian convent closed to the world during the dawn of the nineteenth century; Future diva. de Giulia Louise Steigerwaltbased on the story of Ricardo Schicchi, the discoverer of the cycciolina, Moana Pozzi and other Italian conditioned cinema figures in the 80s; and Vermilionfrom Maura Delpero, Atypical story about the impact of World War II on an isolated mountain town. This latest film, directed by a young filmmaker filmmaker formed in Argentina, where he lives part of the year, was the official Italy representative to Oscar International 2025.
Gloria! (May 8) and Vermilion (June 5) already have a confirmed date of premiere in theaters of our country. The same could happen with Another Enda futuristic romantic drama spoken in English and starring the Mexican Gael García BernalArgentina Béjo Berenice and the Norwegian Renate reinforces curiously scheduled within this cycle for having a director (Piero Messina) and a technical and production team almost entirely Italian.
It could also join the billboard of local premieres of the near future some other title of a program that included this year the most recent works of directors as prestigious and experienced as Gianni Amelio (Battlefield), Marco Tullio Giordana (Life next to) and Pupi Avati (the American garden).
“The cinema will never die. He can’t die. Instead of dinner is just like doing it with several more people, sharing everything with them. After the Covid I recognize that I found some complications to return as a spectator to a cinema, but when I could do it I realized everything I was missing. Today I try to go every time I can, ”says Ozpetek, who also celebrates the confirmation of the premiere in the local cinemas of Diamondsscheduled for Thursday, April 24. Meanwhile, the wonderful restored copy of Rocco and his brothers. Functions remain in the Atlas Patio Bullrich, Cinema Art Cacodelphia and Lorca.
He does not want to anticipate much (“by Cabala”) about it, but Ozpetek has the project under his sleeve (rather a dream that wants to make a reality) to rescue an old inactive room in the center of Rome and put it into operation again With author’s film programming. “There are so many cinemas that close at the moment that undertaking the idea of renewing one of them is a nice challenge. We will see if it is possible to achieve it,” he says before saying goodbye. Ozpetek is one of the great protagonists of this happy moment that Italian cinema in Buenos Aires lives.
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