ITALIAN CONTEMPORARY FILM FESTIVAL at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King West) and the Colossus Centre Vaughan (7501 Weston, Vaughan), from Thursday (June 9) to June 17. icff.ca. Rating: NNN
The Italian Contemporary Film Festival is unlike most Toronto film fests in that it isnt curated by theme or genre or even quality. Its simply a showcase of current Italian cinema, brought to Canada for two weeks of screenings in Ontario and Quebec.
Like most festivals of foreign cinema, the ICFF offers Toronto audiences a chance to catch box office hits that domestic distributors arent willing to import for example, Quo Vado?, the new civil service comedy starring Checco Zalone, which opens the Toronto festival Thursday (June 9, 7 pm, TIFF June 10, 9 and 9:15 pm, Vaughan).
If you dont know who Zalone is, thats sort of the point: his movies dont play in Canada. But hell be in town for the premiere, along with -director Gennaro Nunziante.
One flaw of the ICFF is that the rush to program anything vaguely relevant to Italian cinema leads to some awkward choices, like All Roads Lead To Rome (June 15, 9 pm, Colossus June 16, 9:30 pm, TIFF), a lightweight comedy starring Sarah Jessica Parker as single mom Maggie, who drags her teen daughter (Outlanders Rosie Day) to Tuscany for a bonding vacation, only to have the girl run off with the elderly mother (Claudia Cardinale) of Maggies old boyfriend (Raoul Bova).
If youre looking for something a little more artful, try Antonia (June 12, 2 pm, TIFF), Ferdinando Cito Filomarinos evocative biographical study of the poet Antonia Pozzi. It takes an elliptical approach to Pozzis life and work, and Linda Caridi plays the young poet who died, unpublished, at the age of 26 as a kind of artful sponge, taking in the world and filtering those impressions into simple but evocative text.
This one seems more likely to land an art-house run on this side of the Atlantic heres hoping the right distributor catches it.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
