Italian Film Festival
This year's feast of Italian cinema in Melbourne is filled with award-winners, iconic directors and famous faces.
Overview
Attenzione! Once a year, Melbourne's cinema screens swap their usual fare for a trip to Italy. That time is upon us for 2024. Didn't spend your winter in Europe? Don't have a getaway to the other side of the world planned any time soon? Keen to see an Italian box-office smash without leaving the country? Haven't caught The Godfather Part II on a big screen before? Eager to check out Ralph Fiennes (The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar) and Stanley Tucci (Citadel) as Cardinals electing a new Pope? The Italian Film Festival has you covered.
Between Friday, September 20–Thursday, October 17 — The Astor Theatre, Palace Balwyn, Palace Brighton Bay, Palace Cinema Como, Palace Penny Lane, Palace Westgarth, The Kino, Pentridge Cinema and Cinema Nova, a diverse lineup of Italian cinema will flicker through the projectors, led by opening night's Gloria!. If the name always gets the song of the same moniker stuck in your head, that's fitting: this movie is directed and co-written by a singer. Margherita Vicario didn't give the world the famous tune, but she is the driving force behind this feature about a maid at a refuge in Venice. Vicario is also travelling to Australia for the Italian Film Festival, attending the opening-night festivities in Melbourne.
Gloria! is just one of the fest's high-profile picks in showcase slots. The Great Beauty, Youth and The New Pope filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino's latest is playing as the festival's centrepiece film, with Parthenope following a woman in Naples with the same title as the mythical siren that the city was once named after — and co-starring Gary Oldman (Slow Horses). Then, closing out the fest is Conclave, which is where Fiennes and Tucci come in (plus Killers of the Flower Moon's John Lithgow and Spaceman's Isabella Rossellini, too) for papal thrills.
The aforementioned cinema hit on Italian shores? That'd be post World War II-set melodrama There's Still Tomorrow, aka 2024's Sydney Film Festival Prize-winner. It follows a wife and mother who dreams of a different future, with actor Paola Cortellesi (Petra, Don't Stop Me Now) both starring and making her directorial debut. And Francis Ford Coppola's (Megalopolis) masterpiece The Godfather Part II is celebrating its 50th anniversary at the festival, in one of two throwback flicks. The other: Bread and Tulips, which opened the first-ever Italian Film Festival back in 2000.
Other standouts include Marcello Mio, with Catherine Deneuve (The President's Wife) and Chiara Mastroianni (Monsieur Spade) playing versions of themselves in a comedy that explores the legacy of Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni, the mother-daughter pair's respective former partner and father — and also the Thom Yorke-scored, love affair-focused Trust; Commandante, which opened the 2023 Venice Film Festival; Alba Rohrwacher (La Chimera) in drama In The Mirror; and the mystery-led A Dark Story.
The lineup goes on, whether you're interested in a revenge-thriller meeting a coming-of-age tale in We Were Children, Monica Bellucci (Mafia Mamma) and Vincent Cassel's (The Three Musketeers: Milady) daughter Deva Cassel starring in the page-to-screen The Beautiful Summer, laughing at actor Margherita Buy's (Ripley) directorial debut Volare, catching Beatrice Grannò from The White Lotus season two in rom-com Bad Conscience or, for coffee fiends, saying ciao to documentary The Rise of Espresso.
