COMPETITION

International competition section reserved to features of contemporary filmmakers, not yet released in Italy, judged by a Jury made up of 5 personalities belonging to the cinema and oeno-gastronomic culture.

Just like in 2006, there is an absence of Asian films, all the features being European and, for the first time three Italian works, one about wine, one on water and the other about heresy.

CINEMA, LANDS, TASTE, link them all. The Cuban film has several protagonists, living in a concrete and finally not only tourist La Habana, struggling with everyday’s life and the contradictions of the territory they belong to. The Greek film tells the story of a man who will  overcome his childhood thorny questions thanks to a special dish.

The screenings will take place in Barolo, Castiglione Falletto, Monforte and Serralunga in wine cellars or locations offered by the Communes.

Our sponsors are the Communes or wine producers’ associations, “adopting” the features in competition joining their own mark to the film’s one.

 The features selected for 2007 competition:

COME LE FORMICHE – WINE AND KISSES,
Ilaria Borrelli, Italy 2007, 85’ Italian première
This bittersweet comedy tells the story of two sisters, Sveva and Desideria, who find themselves at a crossroad: even though the destiny leads them to betray each other with their respective husbands, they et together in order to save the farm of their family, where they grew up and where their passions are rooted. The two sisters are at variance with romantic love and their job: Desideria loves horses and rears them to win races, while Sveva loves a very ancient wine, the Rubro, and is ready to do everything for it. For the first time wine – and what a wine! –becomes part of the cast, as one of the leading characters. It doesn’t do just a short appearance, everything turns around it, around his presence, being the teller of a tale rich of history and shades.

HONEY AND THE PIG
Olga Malea, Greece 2005,  88’ Italian première
In spite of his success with women Manos, twenty-five years old, avoids sex. In order to escape from their passionate pursuits, he comes back to his hometown for a little while. Once there, he finds his uncle eating honey sweets with a ten-year-old boy.  It might be a very innocent episode, but Manos fears his uncle has different purposes… Together with Fenia, a twenty-two years old girl working in a funeral parlour, and Marikaki, a little pig in love with honey sweets, Manos tries to unmask his uncle’s real intentions. Manos falls in love with Fenia, while Marikaki clowns around the village. What will happen to Manos and Fenia’s relationship? And will Manos’s suspects about his uncle be prove? In a funny situation, salvation will arrive with a pan of honey sweets.

IL RABDOMANTE/THE DOWSER
Fabrizio Cattani, Italy 2006, 60’
Felice is a frenzied forty-year-old man who lives in an isolated farm in the countryside near Matera. When he begins to use his dowser’s skills to help the farmers of the area in their seek for water, which is lacking, he clashes violently with  Tonino’s business, a criminal that holds the whole area in check. One day Harja, a twenty-five-year-old woman from Eastern Europe, comes to the farm. Harja is actually Tonino’s lover that, gt pregnant, remained pregnant, is escaping because she wants her child to be born in a safe place. This encounter, between to lonely people, in need of love and with a past hard to forget, will mark them deeply…

MARTHA, MEMORIE DI UNA STREGA/MARTHA, MEMORIES OF A WITCH
Giovanni Calamari, Italy 2006, 60’
Hard and imposing like the Dolomites. Sweet and fragile like the paths that cut the plateau of the Sciliar. Martha is the mirror of an ancient mountain made of traditions, tales, fragrant herbs, strain and traditions. She was born in Bolzano and grew up in Castelrotto, a lovely and neat village of Alto Adige. A little bit too neat, actually. Martha quickly understands to be out of place, unable to follow the path other marked out for her. Therefore she starts a long and hard search of identity. She faces up to herself, her village, her family, with resolution, as she faces the endless mountain walks. Together with a rucksack, she carries on her shoulders the weight of the sufferings of all the women that, before her, tried to crumble that cage made up of stones, meadows and pots on windowsills. Martha draws. Draws on the grass, under the sun, to stop her anguish. She sketches out coloured shields to protect herself. She dances around the fire and tells stories on fairies and dwarves. She strips herself of everything: clothes and fears. In the village, they call it “Martha’s disease”. The young woman who was looking for freedom, has found magic. “I am a witch”. And it doesn’t matter if some people don’t believe her.

SUITE HABANA
Fernando Pérez, Cuba/Spain 2003, 84’
La Habana is not only a place, a sound a light: La Habana is its own people. This film tells any day in those people’s life, 10 ordinary and real inhabitants of La Habana, 10 stories among the many possible ones; a child suffering from the Down’s syndrome, assisted by his widowed father; a nurse with a bent for being a vedette; a doctor who plays the clown at children parties; a dancer who maintains his widowed mother; a woman who spends her nights checking that nobody steals or damages the statue of John Lennon that lies in a public garden; an old Marxist professor, now retired; forty-year-old man that moves to Miami after his marriage; an old peanuts’ seller who expects nothing from her life; a railway worker that at night plays the saxophone in a ballroom. Following these characters, Pérez offers a deep immersion in a la Habana where every character represents the curious diversity that animates the city, because there’s not only a single La  Habana: there are many,  invisible and different to live.