The Trento Film Festival goes back to look forward. This year the 70th edition is staged (from 29 April to 8 May), with roots firmly anchored to the past and an eye to the future. This is demonstrated first of all by the choice of the manifestation of the event, by Milo Manara, one of the greatest Italian cartoonists and illustrators. Manara returns to the Festival as a protagonist after his manifesto rejected in 1997 because it was considered too bold by some. «An extraordinary work that of this edition, which has been able to read the time in which we live and its fragility – underlined Mauro Leveghi, president of the festival -. The manifesto is a song of this difficult moment. Nature is frightened by the action of man who has broken this delicate balance. There is therefore an invitation to a different future and the mountains can pave the way towards this future but only with a strong conviction of the culture of the limit ».
On the one hand, therefore, disorientation and fear, on the other, hope for a better future. And it is precisely the look to the future that distinguishes this year’s festival, so much so that the chosen “Destination” – usually a country – is for the first time a temporal dimension, that of the future. As explained by Luana Bisesti, director of the festival: “The idea is to reiterate how the festival has always had an impetus of modernity and experimentation, to investigate distant spaces and places”.
This year there will be literary, cultural and popular events and appointments related to the theme of space. The film program itself includes a section of science fiction films, as explained by Sergio Fant, who together with Enrico Azzano and Miro Forti oversaw the program of the section, in collaboration with the Trieste Science + Fiction Festival: “To celebrate these 70 years we wanted to talk of the history of the festival without remaining prisoners of the cage of the past. So we began to select films: a science fiction film for each decade from the 1950s to the 10s of our century. The mountains, which form the background, are like actors: they become the landscape of the future and allow us to reflect on the fate of the planet ».
The screenings are all open to the public: “Let’s go back to the cinema, we want to find the audience in the room” is the invitation from the festival organizers. A gem – as Fant stressed again – will be the presence at the festival of Luc Moullet, film critic and director of the Nouvelles Vague: he returns to Trento after having been there in ’64 and after his famous article at the time “Nécessité de Trento” published in Cahiers du cinéma. He began like this: «The Trento Festival is the only one, among many, in which form and substance, container and content coincide, something that Cortina and Valladolid can only aspire to…».
Between the lines, Moullet also claims space for mountain cinema, who as an enthusiast had put the Alpine environment at the center of many of his film projects: “Mountain cinema is not a specialty for initiates, and it cannot be less, like animation cinema. It is a fact and an aesthetic necessity ».