Popoli Reloaded - Press Release and Program
The Romanian director Radu Jude, winner this year of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, will be the protagonist of Popoli Reloaded, the initiative organized by the Festival dei Popoli, the international documentary film festival, to celebrate the reopening of theaters, from 15 to 18 June at the Cinema La Compagnia di Firenze, with a selection of his films and an in-person masterclass.
Popoli Reloaded is organized as part of the project for the cataloging, digitization and enhancement of the archives of the Festival dei Popoli and Mediateca Toscana which involve the Cinema Area of the Fondazione Sistema Toscana for the Region of Tuscany and the Archival and Bibliographic Superintendence of Tuscany.
The program presents a selection of 18 documentaries divided into sections: Romania Facing the Past: Radu Jude's cinema (curated by Roberto Manassero in collaboration with the Romanian Academy); Diamonds are Forever, film from the Festival dei Popoli archive (curated by Daniele Dottorini); Doc Explorer, the experimental section of the Festival; The splendor of life: the cinema of Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel (curated by Daniela Persico in collaboration with Forum Austriaco).
Born in 1977, a teenager at the time of the 1989 revolution, a student and then a filmmaker in the years of the Europeanization of Romania, Jude is today one of the most interesting voices in contemporary cinema. The tribute presents six of his films: Aferim! (2015), black and white western set in the mid-19th century, raw and irreverent fresco of a country in transformation (15/06); The Exit of the Trains, on the pogroms against the Jewish population during the Nazi invasion (16/05); the short The Marshall's Two Executions (2018) on the shooting of General Ion Antonescu and The Dead Nation (2017) in which the magnificent photographs of the portraitist Costică Acsinte flow in parallel with the texts of the Jewish doctor, writer and poet Emil Dorian (16/06). And then the brilliant I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History As Barbarians (2018), a black comedy about the collective repression of an entire nation and Uppercase Print, an alienating investigation into the secret police of the Ceausescu regime. The highlight of the tribute was the masterclass with Radu Jude on 17 June at the La Compagnia cinema, an event organized in collaboration with the Romanian Academy in Rome.
Among the flagships of Popoli Reloaded is the selection from the festival's archive which consists of over 15,000 titles with Diamonds are Forever. On the program Out of The Present by Andrei Ujică (1994) on the journey made in 1991 by two Russian astronauts on a space mission while on Earth events lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union; and then Le Souvenir d’un Avenir by Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon (France, 2001), a journey through time through the images of the extraordinary photographer Denise Bellon; finally, Ulysse by Agnès Varda (France, 1982) and The Mesmerist by Bill Morrison (USA, 2003).
The Italian premiere of Notes From The Underworld by Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel (2020) closes the four-day film, a documentary that traces the fictional lives of the Wienerlied tavern singer Kurt Girk and his gangster friend Alois Schmutzer.
Single ticket Full: € 4.00 // Reduced *: € 3.00
Full season ticket: € 25.00 // Reduced *: € 20.00
Full day ticket: € 7.00 // reduced *: € 6.00
Festival dei Popoli Press Office
press@festivaldeipopoli.org || Antonio Pirozzi, 339 5238132
