Held under the auspices of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Instituto Luce Cinecitta the 17th edition of Open Roads was held from June 1- 7 presenting 14 feature films including eight North American and six New York premieres. The selection covered a broad range of approaches, independent productions, as well as work by established and new film makers. As distinct from other countries holding annual niche film fests in the United States such as the Polish Film Festival or the German KINO fest Italian Open Roads showcased commercially appealing features as well as more demanding reflexive productions, while the Polish and German film festivals restricted most of their selections to films that had been shown before at international film festivals and received awards.  Only two of the films shown this year the documentary Deliver by Federica Di Giacomo depicting exorcism practiced by a catholic priest in Italy received at the 2016 Venice Film Festival the Orizzonti Prize and the feature Wordly Girl for which the director Marci Danieli was granted the Brian Award and its stars Serraiocco and Riondino the Pasinetti Awards for their acting performance.

I suspect that the more commercial orientation of Open Roads is due to RAI, the national public broadcasting company of Italy, sponsoring many of the films selected. It remains an open question if this orientation will help placing any of these films into theatrical or video on demand distribution in the United Sates.  Though programmed for the North American audience there is no ‘established’ captive audience for Italian films compared to Jewish or Indian film festivals held in the United States. But there still seems to be a branded Italian cinema perspective because Italian film festivals are held in twelve other urban areas, mostly in small university settings.

Several themes in the 2017 edition were striking since they were more prominent than Open Roads programs of the recent past.  To give some examples : there was a clear issue orientation as reflected in parental impact and conflictual identity formation in  Indivisible by Edoardo  De Angelis and Wordly Girl by Marco Danielli; the rupture of everyday life and the quest for meaning in Ears by Alessandro Arondia and  Tenderness   by Gianni Amelio,2017;  social  stratification in Children of the Night  by Andrea De Sica, Italy Belgium and The War of the Yokels  by Davide Barletti and Lorenzo Conte; the power of the Mafia in At War with Love by Pierfrancesco Diliberto and Two Soldiers by Marco Tullio Giordana, 2017, and the outstanding film The Confession by Roberto Ando (a joint Italian French production from 2016) which profiles the manipulation of politics by the international corporate elite.

In a panel session with most of the directors and some actors present the conflict orientation of the 2017 selection was raised and one of the directors explained that over the last years the Italian cinema had gone through a dark period (“a black hole”) in the selection of the topics and that this was due to the audience [taste] having been shaped by television.

Claus Mueller    filmexchange@gmail.com