“Captain’s Log”, Starting Evening

After the traditional inauguration cocktail the ribbon of this fifth edition of Maremetraggio, Trieste’s International Film Shorts Festival, was finally cut. The public’s turnout could not have been warmer and more enthusiastic: more than 1400 visitors came to the event bearing witness to the sincere affect for what is now a well-consolidated cultural event.

The first film short to be screened, “L.City” by Sandro del Rosario, was recognized straight away as being one of the event’s best: a refined interplay of lights, shades and paper clippings filmed in an ingenious and anti-conventional manner. Highlighted by the notes of a tormenting “tango”, the film short brings back to mind the atmospheres and locations of French “noir” movies in which the rain and empty streets become poetic elements.

A different cut characterized the next film short “Heterogenic” by the duo Dreossi – Della Calce: it is a funny and colourful cartoon (technically stunning) in which we follow the adventures of a funny atom, a molecular particle, which decides to pass to other side after suffering the severest harassment.

Welcomed by the heart-felt laughter of the audience, it is an Italian film short with a truly international scope.
Whoever loves the theatre and in particular Greek tragedy will definitely have appreciated the next film short, “Il vuoto” – The Void – by Giacomo Gatti from Milan. It is a dramatic, livid and intense film short filmed in Sesto San Giovanni (Milan) in the abandoned Falck steel mills; the parallelism between classical theatre and the main character’s personal experience is interpreted perfectly by the young yet skilled actors.

Finally it was the turn of “L’orizzonte degli eventi” – The Horizon Of Events – by Giovanni Covini, a bitter and all but consolatory work that can be summarized in this sentence used as a sort of epigraph at the end: “Italy is a Republic founded on labour”. This is not the case though of a destroyed man who was unfairly fired. His brother looks for him for 24 hours e finally finds him. However, their future has no prospects. It was a work of social condemnation applauded by the audience.

The climax of the first evening was reached with the appearance of Ricky Tognazzi, Simona Izzo, Giovanni Morricone, Sabrina Impacciatore and the actress from Trieste, Ariella Reggio.
Tognazzi’s words without any self-advertising attitude on the importance of film shorts as a cinema genre were much appreciated. His words were followed by a short social spot filmed by Tognazzi with Ariella Reggio: a simple invitation to make the most of the elderly.

The evening (hosted as usual by Andro Merkù) saw the event’s organizers Maddalena Mayneri and Chiara Valenti Omero present the event’s rich program and was then concluded with the screening of the full-length film “Al cuore non si comanda” – You Can’t Command Your Heart – by Giovanni Morricone: a brilliant and lively comedy which tells in a poetic yet dry way of the troubles of a chaotic and adorable thirty-year-old woman played excellently by Claudia Gerini. Written and played in a truly superb way, the film’s score was by Ennio Morricone and it displays the carefree and funny tones typical of Italian comedy.

Riccardo Visintin