Saturday 26 February at the Cinema dei Piccoli will be screened the new film by the director Lorenzo d’Amico de Carvalho, “Gli anni belli”, with the special participation of the RUFA students of Film Arts.
A work not to be missed, conceived and created by two RUFA teachers: Lorenzo d’Amico de Carvalho (direction, screenplay) and Anne-Riitta Ciccone (screenplay). An exceptional cast including Maria Grazia Cucinotta and Ninni Bruschetta, and the special participation of the 2019-2020 first year students of Film Arts, divided between direction and production.
Synopsis
Summer, 1994. A new government has recently come to power and Elena, 17, a lover of Nirvana and budding passionate can’t wait to bring it down. Unfortunately for her, her parents have other plans. The Father, a gruff teacher of Greek, and the Mother, a patient mediator, have been carrying on a custom since the 1970s: jumping in the car and always going to the exact same campsite. This year, however, a surprise awaits them: there is a new Director in the city, and he has changed everything, starting with the name. The new is advancing, and the “Bella Italia” intends to be the new holiday fact. Elena arrives at “Bella Italia” resigned to a hellish summer, but has not come to terms with the surprise arrival of a group of twenty-year-olds (in her big and “very cool” eyes) and above all with the angelic apparition of André , eighteen year old Italian-French almost more handsome than Kurt Cobain. Against the backdrop of an Italy that doesn’t know it but is changing a lot too, Elena is preparing to experience the most exciting summer ever, between revolutions, tears of adolescent love sufferings drowning in huge ice creams, bonfires by the sea , beach games, surprises, revelations and sea trumpets.
If it is true that life can be summed up in ten fundamental summers, this is Elena’s summer of the Beautiful Years, the ones that are never forgotten.
Director’s notes
Gli Anni Belli is the coming-of-age story of a generation, mine, in search of a Revolution in a world where we were told that history was now over. Born into a super-privileged society, the end of the Cold War and the progress of European integration promised us a future of peace, freedom, and eternal economic growth. A perfect world, against which we still felt the urge to rebel. Our adolescence – from the Latin adolesco, which means to grow but also to burn – still pushed us to turn the world upside down. A very difficult operation when everything around you seems built for the sole purpose of satisfying the pleasure principle, and happiness shown as being within everyone’s constant reach, as long as you are in a position to buy it. A world in which to question the status quo, for us, Western bourgeois kids, could seem an ungrateful, childish, and ultimately meaningless attitude: how can you argue that there is something wrong, if everything seems to be working in your favor? And above all, how can you remain convinced that you can change the world, when the Big Issues appear completely beyond your reach? With my co-writer Anne-Riitta Ciccone, we thought the best way to approach this theme was through comedy. Especially for the purpose of intercepting the younger generations, who certainly do not like life being explained to them, and are perfectly capable of reading between the lines of what might at first glance appear to be a story designed only to entertain.
We chose a specific year, that 1994 when the country seemed on the point of taking off towards a new life, a sort of new adolescence of our national community, which in having cleared away the old political class thought it had left itself forever to the backed the dark season of corruption and political extremism, and looked to the future with enthusiasm, while remaining deeply divided within it. We took our protagonist, a girl who longs to be recognized as an adult in a world that insists on not taking her seriously, and we placed her in a microcosm, the campsite, which could be familiar to the public of all ages and country, but at the same time it was inhabited by characters capable of giving the taste of Italy back then, in which to recognize all the roots of Italy today. Finally, we added the sea, the world cup, a family crisis, friendship, and love, and tried to recapture the flavor of summer, that summer of life of which everyone keeps the memory forever in their hearts.
