19/06/2006

After Japan, Spain, France, Mexico and Korea, this year’s international focus of the Pesaro Film Festival will be Argentina, which has been experiencing a "new wave" for at least a decade.

At the same time, the festival is continuing its exploration of Iberian cinema, begun a number of years ago, with a retrospective on Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabelle. From his beginnings as a producer (of Carlos Saura, Marco Ferreri, Luis Buñuel and, more recently, José Luis Guerin), Portabella became a filmmaker who "contaminated" his films with various arts – painting, music and literature – taking on political themes with a decidedly anti-bourgeois tone.

There will also be a "mapping out" of debut Italian filmmakers of the third millennium in the "Best of Youth" Special Event organised by Vito Zagarrio in collaboration with the Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia - Cineteca Nazionale. Alongside already established directors such as Paolo Sorrentino and Vincenzo Marra, the event, which is held at the same time as the Pesaro Film Festival, will feature films by other filmmakers who have not yet found their niche.

Lastly, the competition section – and its award dedicated to the late Lino Miccichè, who founded the festival in 1964 with Bruno Torri – will highlight first and second films from seven countries that point to new trends in fiction and non-fiction, including Sehnsucht by Germany’s Valeska Grisebach, Frozen Land by Finnish director Aku Louhimies and Ça brûle [+see also:
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(Translated from Italian)