Fellini @ 100: "Roma" (1972)

A few volunteers from Team Experience are revisiting Federico Fellini classics for his centennial. Here's Cláudio Alves...

If Rome is the Eternal City, then Federico Fellini might be the Eternal Filmmaker. His cinema exists outside of time, both ancient and strangely new. A filmography that's a circus of pleasures where the grotesque and the beautiful are hand-in-hand, always dancing to a song of transgression and perversity. The faith of the church and the clown's laughter coexist too, precariously, but assuredly, and the images their communion produce are profane marvels. Like ancient frescos, there's a patina of age to these pictures, but they're bright as if they were freshly painted by master artists.

Perhaps no single film better exemplifies these wonderful contradictions than Fellini's Roma…

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Fellini @ 100: "La Strada"

A few volunteers from Team Experience are revisiting Federico Fellini classics for his centennial. Here's Mark Brinkerhoff...

My first recollection of watching La Strada is in a class at school as a youth. Oddly though, I neither can recall which class nor at what age exactly I saw it. But Federico Fellini’s 1954 breakthrough is nothing if not a film that sticks with you, like a bracing force which leaves an imprint that lasts.

A masterwork in Italian neorealism, La Strada (“The Road”) is set largely against the backdrop of a traveling circus, centering on a triangle of sorts between a trio of street performers...

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Best International Feature: Italy, Palestine & Indonesia's contenders

by Cláudio Alves

We're just two weeks away from knowing the 10 finalists for the Best International Feature Oscar. It'll happen on December 16th and, as we wait away the days, it's a good time to investigate the 91 submitted films. Some of them have already been reviewed here at The Film Experience, like Senegal's Atlantics, South Korea's Parasite and Spain's Pain and Glory, among others. Still, there are many less talked about films that deserve attention too, spanning from nationalities that have been overrepresented in the Academy's history to others that have still to conquer their first nomination.

Think of Italy's newest crime epic, Palestine's offbeat comedy or Indonesia's lyrical reveries through a dancer's memories…

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Missing Italy

by Eric Blume

We’re not far from crowning a new Palme d’Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival, and part of the fun and excitement for international film lovers is seeing which country takes the top prize.  The last ten years has marked three winners from France (The Class, Blue is the Warmest Color, and Dheepan), and in fact France has won ten times since 1955 when the prize has been named the Palme d’Or (there was a ten year gap in 1964-74 where the top prize had a different name, for those into these technicalities).   

Winning just under that number, with nine trophies, remains Italy.  Once a mighty force on the international film scene, Italy seems to have fewer major filmmakers emerging.  The last Italian film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes was Nanni Moretti’s film The Son’s Room in 2001...   

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Berlin: Fire at Sea

Amir Soltani is covering the Berlin International Film Festival for The Film Experience this year, our first time at Berlinale!. Tonight, previous Venice winner, Gianfranco Rosi's Fuocoammare.

Gianfranco Rosi shocked the film world with his Golden Lion win at Venice for Sacro GRA a few years ago. At Berlinale, the true shock would be for his latest film, Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare), to leave the festival empty-handed. The Italian maestro’s seamless hybrid of documentary and fiction is a self-reflexive and compassionate meditation on Italy’s crisis of cultural identity in the face of an unprecedented wave of refugee migration.

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