«The pirates are coming». That’s what a lady looking out from a balcony called them when the «Schermi – Cinema Multipiazza» film van arrived with her “crew” for the first time in her working-class neighborhood of Catanzaro. Now Divina Mania’s blue van brings cinema to the uninhabited squares of Italy and on Friday evening it returned to its city, stopping in Piazza Le Pera, in front of the Teatro Cinema Masciari, closed for 12 years and in a total state of abandonment.
The artistic director, Mauro Lamanna, opened the evening by recalling the moments of his childhood spent in the theater seats and the magic of a place that has become a symbol of culture and community. The floor was then given to the representatives of the city’s theater companies in a tribute of memories, nostalgia and hope. The Catanzaro actor Francesco Colella paid homage not only to the theatre, but also to the intrinsic value of culture, cinema and art, understood as spaces of freedom, with a monologue. His words were stones and talismans: «This cinema, this theatre, this place of art is the silent and unheard cry of this city, its open wound, the testimony of a dispersed community, here as elsewhere… It would be different if art began to circulate freely, courageously and copiously in our country again. The answer is yes. And whoever says no is done for.” Then the screening of “Divorce Italian Style” by Pietro Germi (1961).
Last night the last appointment in the Sant’Elia district with “Rear Window” by Alfred Hitchcock.
