Italian movie director and writer Vincenzo Marra, popular for star films such as Sailing Home (2001), Vento di terra (2004) and La Prima Luce (2015) will be one of the main attractions at The Italian Cultural & Culinary Week next week. The announcement was made by the Italian Ambassador, H.E. Domenico Fornana during the unveiling of the programme at the Residence of the Ambassador in Kololo earlier today.
Movie director and writer, Vincenzo Marra. COURTESY PHOTO
With more than nine productions under his sleeve, the 45- year- old director will meet Ugandan film makers and the audience after the screening of La Prima Luce aka First Light, a drama film about the story of a father’s search for his son after his wife travels with the boy to Chile. The movie that is in Italian with English subtitles, won the Pasinetti Award for Venice Days’ Best film 72nd Venice International Film Festival in 2015. His latest release “L’Equilibrio” (which has just been presented at the Venice Film Festival) will also be screened at the Goethe-Zentrum specifically to local filmmakers and film critics on Friday, November 24. In L’ Equilibrio, a well-intentioned priest returns home to the complex and compromised Campania region, around Naples.
According to Cristiano Civitillo, the head of Kampala Film School, one of the partners of the cultural week, Marra will be carrying out workshops on film production as well. “It is a very big honour to have someone of Marra’s experience come and hold a workshop with our film students and makers here. Who knows, may be in future he can do collaborations with film makers in Uganda,” he said. Civitillo believes that the challenge Uganda’s film industry faces is disunity as there are many production houses working separately. “They are able to film and edit but we don’t have big groups of production houses that can work on big projects and do production for big foreign films. This is what we are trying to address. We need people who are specialised in photography as much as we need those in editing and the like,” he says. According to him, the acting aspect in film is what Ugandans have grasped quite well, thus work is needed on the production front.
With the theme set as “Italians at the Movies; Italian in Cinema” and “The Extraordinary Italian Taste”, revellers will be treated to showcase the Italian traditions in the fields of cuisine and cinema from November 20 to November 26. All the events of the week will be free except the gala dinners on Monday and Friday. The main venues for the events are; The residence of the Italian Ambassador in Kololo on Monday 20 , 7 Hills International School on Tuesday 21, Thursdays 23 and Saturday 25, Cafe Latte on Wednesday 22, Kampala Film School, Ggaba on Friday 24 in the morning, Goethe Zentrum, Kampala in the afternoon and Sheraton Kampala Hotel in the evening.