Oct. 25 – “More than a cultural event, it’s the real wealth of a whole generation of immigrants:” the Villerupt Italian Film Festival kicks off tomorrow and will run until November 11 in the French town. The 36th edition of the Festival – explains filmitalia.org – will be structured in four parts: competition, landscape, honors or “Portrait d’Ami,” and retrospectives. This year, the Portrait d’Ami section is dedicated to Paolo Virzi and Micaela Ramazzotti, who will be present at the Festival alongside the director of “Cosimo and Nicole,” Francesco Amato. The retrospective is dedicated to the region of Puglia and the year 1963, with the screening of five great Italian films. Since its foundation in 1976, the Villerupt Festival has regularly hosted between 35,000 and 40,000 spectators. Over the years, great directors like Bellocchio, Bertolucci, Giordana, and actors like Luca Argentero, Claudio Bisio, Alessandro Siani, Christiana Capotondi, and Donatella Finocchiaro participated. The event was the first of its kind in France, showing to each year’s audiences recent and classical pieces of Italian cinema. Every year, the Festival proposes more than sixty films in their original version with subtitles, attracting a growing amount of people: 40,000 visitors in 2012 from France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany.
