Director Adriano Valerio is to head Campolungo!

Adriano Valerio is to head Campolungo, section curated by Massimo Causo and Beatrice Fiorentino, which focuses on cinema by directors whose credits include important shorts and at least one feature film, in the forthcoming ShorTS International Film Festival (Trieste, 1 – 8 July 2023).

Recent winner with Calcutta 8:40 AM (France 2022) of the Corto d’Argento 2023 awarded to “fiction” shorts, a prize organised each year by the SNGCI, the union of Italian film journalists, his films to be presented are 6 shorts and 1 feature film, all works centred on stories near or far, long or short, real or only imagined.

On Thursday 6 and Friday 7 July Adriano Valerio is to be the guest of the Trieste Festival to introduce his works and at the end hold a meeting attended by the public and many Italian and foreign directors who are to take part in the various competitions in the event.

Maurizio di Rienzo, director of ShorTS IFF, explained the choice of this focus on Adriano Valerio: «Campolungo year 1 welcomes, let’s say it loud and clear, the increasingly successful global cinema of Adriano Valerio, eternaut with a carefully omnivore attention for real geographies and souls, poised between bodies in love and unknown lands. In some of his pregnant, impactful, award-winning shorts Valerio takes us to a remote island in the south Atlantic, the complexities of Shanghai and Calcutta, to Tunis for his football epic, the French countryside and elsewhere. And to an unconventional Romania with Banat – Il viaggio (Bulgaria, Italy, Romania 2015), his first feature film. Focus on a director who broadens the narrative horizons irrespective of the mere length of the very human stories he shines a light on».

According to Massimo Causo and Beatrice Fiorentino, curators of the Campolungo section:

«Adriano Valerio is a director in transit, one of those Italian filmmakers who with their cinema are mapping out a perspective of an expressive and conceptual escape beyond all boundaries. The debut feature film, Banat – Il viaggio (Bulgaria, Italy, Romania 2015), reaches the heart of a process which created an expressive and cultural road map in the shorts that preceded and followed, making him an example of a filmmaker sensitive to the fluidity of narrative forms and to the potential for expression and production of every type of cinema. Having trained in Italy in the workshop of Marco Bellocchio, Adriano Valerio decided to seek out in France the visual and thematic horizons of his filming perennially pushed towards somewhere else, in which figures and spaces find and lose themselves at the same time. The debut feature film Banat – Il viaggio tells of a love story between Puglia and Romania, clinging on to the uncertainties of places and of the heart. Themes which Valerio had already explored in the magnificent short 37°4 S (France 2013), a highly sensitive chronicle of the love pangs of an adolescent lost in the heart of the Atlantic, with which he had won a special mention at Cannes and the David di Donatello award. Yet all his films are a journey through emotional states suspended over present uncertainties, as demonstrated by his other shorts: the two children lost in the early afternoon in the country in August (France, Italy 2015), the shifting sentiments of a relationship between Bari and Casablanca in Mon amour, mon ami (France 2017), the expectations and dream of redemption through football in Tunisia in Les Aigles de Carthage (France, Tunisia, Italy 2020), the instinct for escape in Shanghai midway between solitude and anxiety in The Nightwalk (France, Italy 2021) and the anguish of an inevitable departure in the recent Calcutta 8:40 AM (France 2022)».