Premio Cinema del Presente 2023 goes to Stefano Savona

Stefano Savona devises and makes Cinema del Presente with a vision that is as analytically documentary as it is aesthetically intuitive. He’s in the middle of his significantly diverse technical-narrative journey, a human and geopolitical all-rounder. The complex historical features of the Southern Mediterranean and the Middle East are the bloody and controversial borders he explores with the greatest feeling. Sometimes with a courageously political impetus: in Primavera in Kurdistan he goes to the post-Saddam Kurdish-Iraqi mountains of the resistance; in Piombo fuso he crosses alone the dangerous Egypt-Gaza Palestinian tunnel bombed by Israel, a tormented territory where he returns with La strada dei Samouni to find and perhaps soothe the anxiety and isolation of a large family ethnically decimated years earlier by those enemy rockets; he arrives punctually in the rebellious heart of the then-unleashed Arab Spring for Tahrir Liberation Square. These works are the mature fruit of his having set out to document lives from his Sicilian-African sea with Siciliatunisia and Un confine di specchi on the reciprocity of fishermen’s lives. He then focused on his participatory civic and assembly Palermo with Palazzo delle Aquile. Therefore, working and wandering as a truly independent maker-producer-director of photography-editor, a guest and prize-winner at major festivals such as Cannes, Berlin, Locarno, Venice, in his later journey, Le mura di Bergamo, Savona with equally probing and respectful ethical attention has focused on dismay, errors and sorrow, marked by the recent pandemic, by going there – and returning several times for two years – with young former students of his from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Palermo to record those tragic events from different points of view and pinpointing a city location where the bereaved could go to. Here is a director who from the Present knows how to capture the movement of souls by rendering it tough and true Cinema.

Maurizio di Rienzo