The 21st edition of Rome Independent Film Festival will take place in Rome, Italy from November 17th to the 25th, 2022 with more than 85 contemporary films in competition.
The Italian premiere of The Wind Blows the Border by Laura Faerman and Marina Weis will open the documentary section in competition at the Festival. Shot in Brazil, it is an investigative reporting film, with an international breath, directed by a couple of young filmmakers.
Alice, the debut film by Krystin Ver Linden, starring Keke Palmer, Common, and Jonny Lee Miller will open the Festival on Friday November 18th. Alice is part of RIFF special section- Black Films Matter, the first official section of an Italian film festival designed for the African-American cinema. The section has the purpose of getting the audience closer to films and directors that are revolutionizing the way of telling black people and the United States.
Among the titles in competition include the world-premiere of Loving Memories, by French director Guillaume Bureau, and Corsa abusiva by Andrea Bifulco.
Other films include The Uncle, the debut film of David Kapac and Andrija Mardeši?, a co-production between Croatia and Serbia that leads us to the 1980s Yugoslavia. Eami by Praguayan director Paz Encina relates to the disquieting parabola of the indigenous groups removal in the Gran Chaco region in South America.
Also in competition, two Italian films: Un mondo fantastico and Tra le onde. The first one, the world-premiere of docufilm by Michele Rovini, is the story of two different men who try to make ends meet and fulfill a great dream they have in common about music. Tra le onde by Marco Amentais a dark fairytale of both melodrama and thriller. It is about a former fisherman who starts a journey to bring the corpse of a drowned migrant back to his wife. The film’s main characters are Sveva Alviti and Vincenzo Amato.
Boney Piles by Ukrainian filmmaker Taras Tomenko is a story about what it means to grow in present-day eastern Ukraine, in a land torn apart by war. One of the Festival’s highlights is the Focus on Ukraine, in collaboration with Molodist Festival of Kyev and the support of UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency).
In the other sections, for the third year in a row, Love & Pride Day: the value of diversity is back, in collaboration with The Open Reel and Locarno Film Festival. Since 2019, RiFF has dedicated a whole day to the screening of LGBTQ+ works. A window on gender issues and the right of choice. Among the films, At Night All Cats Are Black by the Swiss Valentin Merz, a special mention at Locarno Film Festival 2022, the story depicts the set and shooting in the countryside of a “libertine” costume film. Suddenly, the director disappears and the police starts investigating, while the shooting continues.
Some of the special events include the Focus on Poland featuring the European-premiered Escape to the Silver Globe by Kuba Mikurda, in the documentary competition, which is a declaration of love for film that evokes the shooting atmosphere of the 1970s Poland.
Also in out of competition is the film On the Silver Globe, Andrzej Zulawski’s unfulfilled dream. A unique, visionary and cursed film, that the Polish master shot in the 1970’s, but he completed a decade later because of endless fights with the government and the censorship. A monumental work, albeit fragmentary, made of impressive crowd scenes, completed only in 1988 with the addition of voice comments by the director, instead of the missing sequences. The film was presented at Cannes Film Festival in 1988 and was critically acclaimed as one of the best science-fiction films in the history of Cinema. In 2016, it was restored and digitized.
Out of Competition is also the closing film, Troppa Famiglia directed by Pierluigi Di Lallo, with Ricky Memphis. The film is the story of an extended family of a small village in Abruzzo during Covid emergency.
Eleven documentaries in competition, including the opening film The Wind Blows the Border, and Into the Lights by Moses Fiddian-Green.
On the line-up is also Blue Dots by Lorenzo Squarcia about an old man who spends his days sitting on a bench of the Washington Square Park in New York; Libere di vivere by Antonio Silvestre, on the sensitive issue of gender-based economic violence and Come una vera coppia by Christian Angeli, docufilm shot during a “holiday for couples” organized by Aipd Nazionale as part of a project on emotional and sexual education involving 180 people with Down syndrome.
And also: Il Teatro è adesso by Alessandro Gaeta, on the situation of the Theatre in the time of Covid and D’Annunzio: l’uomo che inventò se stesso by Francesca Pirani and Stefano Viali, a pop and contemporary restyling of the “Poet”.
Shot in Burkina Faso over five years, Il paese delle persone integre by Christian Carmosino Mereu is a documentary on the search for freedom of four Burkinabé citizens. Moruroa Papa by Paul Manate Raoux is a documentary about the director’s visit to his father in Ruturu, a small island of the French Polynesia, where the man isolated himself; and Love-Lights by the Portuguese Acacio de Almeida and Maria Carré is a reflection about light.