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POPOLI 2020

The rock of Patti Smith opens the 61st Festival dei Popoli

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- From 15 to 22 November, the Florence International Documentary Film Festival offers 48 film in streaming, among them the world premiere of Duccio Chiarini’s L'occhio di vetro

The rock of Patti Smith opens the 61st Festival dei Popoli
Patti in Florence by Edoardo Zucchetti

Edoardo Zucchetti’s documentary Patti in Florence, which explores the special relationship between the great rock artist Patti Smith and the city of Florence that began with her legendary 1979 show in front of 60,000 spectators, will have its world premiere on Sunday 15 November opening the 61st edition of the Festival dei Popoli, International Documentary Film Festival. The event is taking place online until 22 November on Più Compagnia, a virtual screening room in partnership with MYmovies (with all films available for streaming for seven days).

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“Once more,” said Claudia Maci, organizational director, and Alessandro Stellino, artistic director, “festivals were left without a home and found one in that of each spectator. The 61st edition of the Festival dei Popoli enters everyone's homes with a program rich in voices telling us about the time we live in as they unfold before our eyes and the instability of a social and political landscape that must be monitored by attentive and civil eyes".

The program of the historic event, chaired by Vittorio Iervese, features 60 documentaries divided into various sections. In addition to the International Competition (18 films including feature films, medium length and short films, all exclusive in Italy) and the Italian Competition (7 titles, all completely exclusive), the programme includes the Let the Music Play section, dedicated to musical documentaries, and a focus on the environment titles Habitat, with 9 Italian premieres.

And the international features, which will be judged by Joëlle Bertossa (Switzerland), Maria Bonsanti (Italy) and Andrei Ujica (Romania), we find Karima Saïdi’s A Way Home, in which the Belgian director of Moroccan origins reuters to take care of her mother Aicha, who suffers from Alzheimer’s and had the strength to raise four children alone between Tangiers and Brussels; Leandro Picarella’s Divinations [+see also:
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, which tells the parallel stories of a young craftsman of Moroccan origins and an elderly fortune teller; Alina Gorlova’s This Rain Will Never Stop [+see also:
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interview: Alina Gorlova
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, about a young Kurd fleeing the Syrian conflict who arrived in Ukraine; Jawad Rhalib’s Fadma: Even Ants Have Wings [+see also:
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, focused on Fadma who, after arriving in a small village in Morocco with her family for the holidays, put herself at the head of local women’s movement; Downstream to Kinshasa [+see also:
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from Congolese director Dieudo Hamadi and Lonely Rock [+see also:
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from Argentine director Alejandro Telémaco Tarraf.

In the Italian Competition — with a jury composed of Marta Donzelli, producer, Maria Letizia Gatti, of distribution company Reading Bloom, and Alessandro Raja of Festival Scope — we find the world premiere of The Glass Eye [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
from Florence-born director Duccio Chiarini, which is based on the war diary of his great-uncle and uses rare archival materials. Laura Lamanda described the “Service des Objets Trouvés” in Paris in L'îles des perdus. Aylesbury Estate by Carlotta Berti tells the story of a community living in London’s biggest public housing complex. The other films are Il libro di Giona by Zlatolin Donchev, L’Armée Rouge by Luca Ciriello, Bosco by Alicia Cano and Eskere by Alessandro Abba Legnazzi.

Among the special events is Bulletproof by Todd Chandler, centred on America’s culture of violence. New in this edition is the Popoli for Kids & Teens section, a selection of documentaries aimed at young people and which will have its own jury, composed of teenagers aged 14 to 17 years old. Finally, the Doc at Work - Future Campus is dedicated to training and emerging talents, with a series of webinars for professionals in the sector and young producers in collaboration with CNA Toscana.

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(Translated from Italian)

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