Since 2005, in cooperation with Lab 80 film, FIC-Federazione Italiana Cineforum, Bellaria Film
Festival, Torino Film Festival, Nuovo Cineforum Rovereto and Vitagraph, Bergamo Film Meeting
has been developing the “Avanti!” project, meant to promote and distribute independent, digitally
produced Italian films that have taken part in various national film festivals. Films are selected by
a jury made up of representatives from all festivals adhering to the project, and then circulated
within the film club network, and all those cultural circuit theatres interested in discovering new
personalities and emerging directors that have a precarious existence in that undefined cultural
area where cinema is made out of pure passion.
Lab80 film, an institution that has always been operating in the cultural circuit, attends to the Italian
distribution of the selected films.
Up to now, the “Avanti!” project has already produced 7 programmes, with about 30 works, either
half-length and feature films, that are distributed in DVD format and available to public projections.
In this SPECIAL #1 edition we present a first selection of 5 films, chosen among the many we
selected in the last three years, so as to make them available to international festivals and to
provide them with a broader diffusion and higher visibility.
The films are presented in DVD or DVCam formats, with English subtitles, and will be available
from 1 October 2008 to festivals requesting it, with no hiring fees. Mailing expenses (return
fare) are covered by the festival hosting the Avanti Special #1 programme. Bergamo Film Meeting
and Lab 80 film are in charge of the copies management.
For further information and requests please contact
avanti@lab80.it
Mio fratello Yang (My Brother Yang)
(Chinese, with English subtitles)
Dir. by Massimiliano and Gianluca De Serio (Italy 2005, 15’)
Bing, a Chinese girl, arrives in Turin from China. Waiting for her she finds her new brother…
Fuori Fuoco (Out of Focus)
(English, with Italian subtitles)
Dir. by Ernaldo Data and Daniele Salaris (Italy 2006, 28’)
Jerusalem-Tel Aviv, August 2006. Four young Israeli lesbians, a bunch of religious queers from
all over the world in a reduced, wartime Pride, a gay Arab dressing up and acting in drag: in the
background, the war in Lebanon…
The Burning Wake
(English, with Italian subtitles)
Dir. by Giacomo Cesari (Italy 2006, 27’)
The artistic and mental work of John Kamikaze, a fakir at the Marseille circus directed by Pierrot
Bidon. This film is a journey through a land both physically and spiritually unknown to the
protagonist, a land suspended between dream and reality that becomes, in its landscapes, the
theatre of an inexorable journey of knowledge and research.
Roi du Silence (King of Silence)
(silent)
Dir. by Francesco di Loreto and Beppe Giacobbe (Italy 2006, 15’)
This is a tale on the impossibility of silence to manifest itself in contemporary society. Silence can
be either total absence, or the excessive presence of sounds and noises. But how can we expect
an absolute lack of sounds if even desert dunes produce recordable sounds?
Fedeli alla linea, quasi (Following the Party Line; Or, Sort of)
(Italian, with English subtitles)
Dir. by Tommaso Lessio (Italy 2007, 18’)
In Venice, in the urban landscape of drying laundry and ubiquitous religious artefacts, there is a
historical office of Rifondazione Comunista, the present-day communist party in Italy. When nextdoor
DS (former communists now turned into a social democrat party) appropriate old symbols, or
when a demonstration of Lega (a right-wing party) militants takes place, passion rises again and
the people’s simplicity finds a new spur to active politics.
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via G. Reich, 49
I -24020 Torre Boldone (Bg)
Tel. +39 035 363087
Fax +39 035 341255
info@bergamofilmmeeting.it