The San Diego Italian Film Festival celebrates its third year, starting October 16 through November 7. The festival provides an opportunity for all Italians and lovers of Italian culture to rediscover passion, love, and the best flavors of life in this season’s festival.
This year's San Diego Italian Film Festival features major recently released Italian films by internationally acclaimed award-winning directors. Festival films have English subtitles.
The Festival is made possible through a collaboration with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura of Los Angeles, the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park, and the Ministero degli Affari Esteri in Rome and independent distributors.
Festival continues until Saturday, November 7
The film for November 4th is: "Apena"
Admission: Free, but $5 donation requested.
For more information, please call: (619) 238-7559
or visit: www.sandiegoitalianfilmfestival.com
This year's San Diego Italian Film Festival features major recently released Italian films by internationally acclaimed award-winning directors. Festival films have English subtitles.
The Festival is made possible through a collaboration with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura of Los Angeles, the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park, and the Ministero degli Affari Esteri in Rome and independent distributors.
Festival continues until Saturday, November 7
The film for November 4th is: "Apena"
Director Roberto Dordit’s first full-length feature APNEA is what might be termed a noir. Its double-edged structure engages the viewer in the slow undoing of the characters’ superficial forms and attributes. The main character, Paolo, is played by Claudio Santamaria, a familiar face in recent Italian cinema. The narrative of this film unfolds from Paolo’s last breaths as he is drowning.
The title, Apnea, and the sport of fencing, offer instructive keys to possible readings of the film. The first suggests the suspension of external breathing, as in free-diving, in other words holding one’s breath. The director uses this suspension as a technique by which to extend the last moments of a man’s life in order to have it “relive” it and open up other narrative threads. The suggestion seems to be that as certain events those that have conditioned them find the terms of their own continuation.
Fencing is as a combat sport in which the opponents directly handle their weapons in close proximity to each other. It is intimate and suggestive, by virtue of the uniforms worn and their erasures of individual features and personalities.
As with apnea, fencing also suggests a struggle with one’s self that is this time externalized. The attempt to hold one’s breath to keep from drowning is a struggle against the natural instinct to breathe; the challenge of one’s mirror image in fencing poses in a sense one’s self as the opponent.
The director of this film places these two sport metaphors in the context of an apparent exposè of the actions and misdirections of a particularly privileged social class. The result is that the sports tend to suggest a closer analysis of the larger social context and each individual’s participation within it. Just as Paolo and Franz’s lives and selves are made indistinguishable by their fencing attire, so each individual’s life is also made accountable for the function of the society in which they might live. Director Dordit also presents a number of other elements in Apnea, such as Franz’s son’s autism, that hint at how we tend to live our lives in realities that we perceive to be separate and uniquely individual.
In the end, what this noir proposes is to lead its viewers into their own investigation of the various layers of “reality” that separate us from each other.(Review by Prof. Pasqual Verdiccio, UCSD)
Admission: Free, but $5 donation requested.
For more information, please call: (619) 238-7559
or visit: www.sandiegoitalianfilmfestival.com
