Visionaria Toscana
If I was saying that Fano is a beautiful town, I certainly have no words to describe Siena. For some odd reason this was my first time there and it was a bit of a rushed visit prior catching the plane back to Sydney. This festival is massive in the sense that it takes the 20 finalist films around different towns in Tuscany and even different venues in Siena. The festival starts in October and continues well into November (there are other sections too) and The New Life competed in three categories (audience, jury and critics)... It was good to see that the film was well received (for example, on the night of November 1st, it was the audience's favourite when the films were shown at Colle Val di Elsa... not that I was there but I saw the voting results per night). Regardless of all this, a reason for personal satisfaction is to see the film shown all over Dante's land (and my mother's family land for that matter) Tuscany. In case you didn't know, the film was triggered by one of Dante's books three or four years ago when we wrote the script with Damien. When I was arriving to Siena by train, I overhead this conversation between two high school students: A) "Do you have much homework?" B) "I have to learn two verses of the Inferno and two of the Paradise" (Referring to Dante's Divine Comedy)... and here I was coming from the other end of the world to show them what we had made out of Dante's work. I also had the pleasure of meeting some of the organizers like the festival's artistic director Mauro Tozzi, and other collaborators such as Barbara Mottola, Roberto Dini and Claudio Santori, who was very kind and gave me a ride back to my hotel after the session.
If I was saying that Fano is a beautiful town, I certainly have no words to describe Siena. For some odd reason this was my first time there and it was a bit of a rushed visit prior catching the plane back to Sydney. This festival is massive in the sense that it takes the 20 finalist films around different towns in Tuscany and even different venues in Siena. The festival starts in October and continues well into November (there are other sections too) and The New Life competed in three categories (audience, jury and critics)... It was good to see that the film was well received (for example, on the night of November 1st, it was the audience's favourite when the films were shown at Colle Val di Elsa... not that I was there but I saw the voting results per night). Regardless of all this, a reason for personal satisfaction is to see the film shown all over Dante's land (and my mother's family land for that matter) Tuscany. In case you didn't know, the film was triggered by one of Dante's books three or four years ago when we wrote the script with Damien. When I was arriving to Siena by train, I overhead this conversation between two high school students: A) "Do you have much homework?" B) "I have to learn two verses of the Inferno and two of the Paradise" (Referring to Dante's Divine Comedy)... and here I was coming from the other end of the world to show them what we had made out of Dante's work. I also had the pleasure of meeting some of the organizers like the festival's artistic director Mauro Tozzi, and other collaborators such as Barbara Mottola, Roberto Dini and Claudio Santori, who was very kind and gave me a ride back to my hotel after the session.