‘MovieMov’ in Manila pays homage to Sergio Leone, Manuel Conde

The 2012 edition of the Italian Film Festival pays homage to two great internationally acclaimed cinema directors: Italian Sergio Leone and Filipino Manuel Conde. This year’s “MovieMov: Italian Cinema Now,” which runs from December 4 to 9 at Greenbelt 3 cinemas, showcases seven films directed by Leone, often described as the pioneer and master of “Spaghetti western,” a cinema genre that creatively combined American characteristics with Italian ways. Emanuela Adesini, cultural attaché of the Italian Embassy in Manila, said in an interview that a newly restored version of the 253-minute long “Once Upon A Time in America” is one of the seven Leone films that will be shown during the six-day festival.

“Once Upon A Time in America,” although violent and gory, is an elegiac cinematic masterpiece on the sad, wasted lives and loves of a group of gangsters, notably that of David “Noodles” Aaronson, spanning from the early 1920s to 1968 in New York’s Lower East Side. The film features Robert De Niro as Aaronson, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Treat Williams and Tuesday Weld. Critics have said that Leone showed his mastery of narrative because he was able to make the film “work on so many different levels: it was both a criticism of gangster-film mythology and a continuation of the director's exploration of the issues of time and history.” The other Leone films to be exhibited are “The Colossus of Rhodes” (1961); “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), starring Clint Eastwood and Gian Maria Volonte; “For a Few Dollars More” (1965), with Eastwood and Lee van Cleef; “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” (1966), with Eastwood and Van Cleef; “Once Upon A Time in the West” (1968), starring Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson; and “A Fistful of Dynamite” (1971), with Rod Steiger and James Coburn. Leone, who invented and mastered the “Spaghetti western” genre, was initially derided by both cinema critics and cineastes. “Little by little, the critics and the people realized that Leone’s movies were interesting. They can be funny yet serious. Italian comedy is funny and yet sad,” Adesini said in the interview. Except for “The Colossus of Rhodes,” whose music was composed by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, all the six other Leone works feature the musical score of his childhood friend and classmate, Ennio Morricone. Leone and Morricone were said to have established “one of the greatest director-composer partnerships” often compared with the likes of Eisenstein and Prokofiev, Hitchcock and Herrmann, and Fellini and Rota. Morricone is also best remembered for his scoring of Giuseppe Tornatore's “Cinema Paradiso” (1988). In the same interview, Adesini said that Manuel Conde’s internationally and critically acclaimed “Genghis Khan,” recently digitally restored with the assistance of the Italian government, is one of the four Filipino films to be shown during the MovieMov. “Genghis Khan” (1950) — starring Elvira Reyes, Inday Jalandoni, Lou Salvador, Jose Villafranca, Darmo Acosta, Africa dela Rosa, Ric Bustamante, Ely Nakpil, Juan Monteiro, Andres Centenera and Leon Lizares — tells the story of restless Mongolia’s tribes and their search for a unifying leader. “Genghis Khan” competed in the 1952 Venice Film Festival, while the newly digitally restored version was shown in the 69th Venice Film Festival last September. Adesini said the five other Filipino films in the lineup are Chito Roño’s “Dekada ’70”; Olivia Lamasan’s “Milan”; Gutierrez Mangansakan II’s “Qiyamah”; and the winner of the Second Sineng Pambansa Film Festival to be awarded on November 25. Brillante Mendoza’s “Thy Womb,” which features Nora Aunor, will also be showcased. Last year’s edition of the MovieMov paid tributes to Bernardo Bertolucci, Dario Argento, and Brillante Mendoza. Film director, producer, and screenwriter Argento’s recently released “Dracula 3D” is one of the films in this year’s roster. A 20-minute trailer of the “Dracula 3D” was shown in last year’s festival. Brothers Paolo and Vittorio Tavian’s “Cesare deve Morire (Ceasar Must Die)” opens the six-day MovieMov. The film won this year’s Golden Bear award at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival and is Italy’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 85th  Academy Awards next year, competing against the Philippine entry “Bwakaw,” directed by Jun Robles Lana and starring Eddie Garcia. Italian Ambassador to the Philippines Luca Fornari said in a separate interview that the 2012 MovieMov is bigger than last year’s as the Italian films will be shown in Baguio, Davao, and Iloilo. Fornari said the “red carpet walk” by the stars, directors, producers, and other luminaries during the opening night ceremonies will be televised. “The live coverage, in a way, means that little by little, Manila will be like the Cannes International Film Festival with live coverage,” he said. “The combination of red carpet and the live coverage for Italian Film Festival is only done in the Philippines. No other Southeast Asian country has this magnitude of red carpet preparations and the mounting of the film festival itself. The live coverage of red carpet rites symbolically puts manila as the center of the cinema industry in this part of the world, and through this, Manila, little by little is back on the screen of international cinema,” Fornari said. In a separate interview, Chairman Briccio Santos of the Film Development Council of the Philippines said MovieMov is “a very good opportunity to connect the rich film cultures and traditions” of Italy and the Philippines. “This kind of cross cultural engagement is excellent. Each country’s film tradition recognizes the other film culture and tries to form a bridge between the two film cultures,” he said. “The red carpet is synonymous to a film festival. Its significance in the MovieMov in the Philippines is its cross-cultural exchange and its broadening scope of cultural exchange. One has to understand that Philippines is one of the oldest film cultures in Asia. We were the ones who taught the Malaysians and Indonesians film-making. Our film culture started in 1908, only 12 years after cinema was invented in Paris,” Santos said. This year’s cycle of MovieMov started in Rome last September, then moved to Bangkok last July, the Philippines in December, and New Delhi early next year. “MovieMov is really cinema in movement, traveling from Italy to Asia to present and promote Italian cinema in Asia and vice versa, presenting Asian films from Asian countries to Italy. What they showed in the other cities is different from what they are showing in Manila, which illustrates the constant flow of ideas in the creation of Italian cinema,” Fornari said. Fornari added the screening of Italian films along with Filipino films “gives us a chance to compare the contemporary panorama of both countries.” “This is important as both Italian and Philippine cinemas, in the past few years, have become more and more important in the international scene, thanks to a new generation of young directors and actors who are highly regarded and wanted in the festival circuit,” he said. Aside from “Cesare deve Morire” and Carlo Verdone’s “Posti in Piede in Paradiso,” the seven other films will be officially unveiled on Tuesday, November 20, at a press conference. Adesini said the Manila MovieMov has nine films selected from a list of cinema released in 2011 and 2012. All the nine contemporary films are in competition with the winner to be selected by an all-Filipino jury. Director Marcello Bellochio’s “Vincere” (2009) — a story of Mussolini’s secret lover Ida Dalser, and their son Albino — won last year’s MovieMov prize for best film. Ferzan Ozpetek’s “Mine Vaganti” (Loose Cannon) was given the special jury prize for its masterful telling of the travails of Tommaso, a gay literature student, who wanted to come out to his family, but his older brother Antonio, who is also gay, disrupted his plans. The 2012 MovieMov is supported by the General Direction for Cinema of the Italian Ministry of Heritage and Culture, the Film Development Council of the Philippines, the Embassy of Italy, Playtown, the Philippine-Italian Association, Rustan's, and The Peninsula Manila. — KBK, GMA News