Phantoms to revisit Venice Film Festival

It is a continuation of the festival’s exploration into the vaults of Italian cinema and will see screenings of thirty films from between the Forties and Eighties.

The programme aims to reveal films that give an accurate picture of the nation’s movie trends of those years rather than uncover individual hidden masterpieces.

Films programmed fall into three categories: Films for the people, Eccentric films (including Mario Monicelli’s Hurricane Rosie) and Films with Female Stars (including Giovanna Ralli in Carmen Di Trastevere, 1963 and Claudia Cardinale in The Lovemakers, 1961). Additionally, a series of forgotten classics will be screened including Stories In The Sand by Riccardo Fellini, the brother to Federico Fellini whose La Dolce Vita turns fifty this year.

Sergio Toffetti, who curated the 2008 retrospective These Phantoms: Italian Cinema Rediscovered, will reprise the role.

Venice began to focus on trends in Italian cinema in 2004, when the when the festival hosted the wildly popular Italian Kings of the Bs, which director Quentin Tarantino helped to curate and present. The retrospective sparked a successful revived interest in Italian B movies. Subsequent retrospectives – have been run under the titles The Italian Underground, Casanova On The Screen, Spaghetti Westerns.

The Venice Film Festival runs from September 2 -12.