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Franco Cicero, Vittorio Cecchi Gori and Francesco Cannavà
«The film festival is reborn to reclaim an identity story for us, updating it». And in saying this Francesco Cannavà holds in his hands a tome of hundreds of pages, the result of weeks of research on a single topic: the Messina Film Festival. The one that was born in 1955, which until 1958 took place exclusively in Messina, which until 1998 was organized in “tandem” with Taormina, and then left the baton definitively, in 1999, at the Taormina Film Festival. A story that Cannavà repeats by heart, driven by the passion that today, a few days after the inauguration of the new urban park of the former Fair (“but let’s hope they find a nice name” he says together with Davide Liotta, soul of the Arb cultural association), leads him to be the artistic director of the Festival which is reborn, retying the threads of history, but with its own clear imprint, today farther from the glitter of that era, but closer to the true essence of Cinema, the one with the capital “C”.
The film festival will be the flagship of the first summer of the new urban park, it will be held from 26 July to 1 August, “the day on which the very first edition was inaugurated”, organized by 8Road Film of Cannavà and the Arb cultural association, with the fundamental support of the Municipality of Messina (“it all started a couple of years ago, when Mayor Basile gave us the opportunity to sit around a table”) and the Messina Foundation for Culture, in collaboration with another body that has believed in this restart from the beginning, the Port System Authority chaired by Francesco Rizzo. Support also comes from the Dams department of the University, from UniversoMe, from the Colapesce studio and from the Pvk Produzioni video agency, with an all Messina teamwork, just as the soul of the scientific committee and the jury is from Messina which, at the end of the Festival, will award the best feature film of the international competition: president is Franco Cicero, the other members are Nino Genovese, Cettina Donato, Dario Tomasello, Federico Vitella.
Guest of honor on the opening evening will be Vittorio Cecchi Gori, but at a “distance” due to his ailments: the video interview conducted in Rome by Cicero himself, together with Cannavà, will be screened, and during which Cecchi Gori told “his” Messina Festival and his relationship, as a producer, with Sicily, starting from the film The Postmanmade in Salina. «This first edition – explains the artistic director – will focus on the theme of the sea, each film will have its own connection with the sea and with the play on words ‘Loving’, uniting love and the sea, in fact».
There will be two masterclasses with national professionals: one with the screenwriter and director Antonio Le Fosse, who will talk about TV series, the other with the producer Vanessa Zerda Rueda and the composer Silvia Leonetti, together with the Messina cartoonist Lelio Bonaccorso. Fabio Pilato is also from Messina, the sculptor and master of iron who created the Rassegna prize, the unpublished work Queen of Pelorowhich represents the genius loci of the city.
During the evenings (all with free entry) social themes will be discussed, from Palestine to the war in Iran, and, above all, we will talk about cinema, we will see a lot of cinema. Five films have been selected from all over the world for the feature film competition, another competition will be dedicated to short films, and every evening there will be space for local films. Because this review wants to be strongly identifying, «to demonstrate – says Cannavà – that the time is ripe for the Messina community to be able to organize a review independently and to enhance the film industry».