The 71st Trento Film Festival opens with Denis Imbert's film Sur les chemins noirs, with Jean Dujardin
Published 29/03/2023
Announcement of the opening and closing films, along with feature films screened out of competition at the 71st Trento Film Festival, scheduled from 28 April to 7 May, pending details of the full programme. The film programme will close with Rispet, Trentino director Cecilia Bozza Wolf’s debut feature film.
Over 120 films will be screened at the 71st edition of Trento Film Festival, mostly documentaries of different durations and formats, in line with tradition, recounting the world of the mountains from the most diverse perspectives. However, in the Premieres section, the varied programme also includes narrative feature films, including the two films chosen to open and close the festival this year.
The film programme will open on Saturday 29 April with the international premiere of Sur les chemins noirs,just released in France, based on the autobiography of the same name by the French writer Sylvain Tesson, already known for La Panthère des Neiges, which won the Gold Gentian for Best Film on Exploration or Adventure in Trento in 2022. In Denis Imbert’s film the main character is played by Jean Dujardin, winner of theBest Actor Oscar for The Artist, in the role of Pierre, a famous explorer and writer always in search of adventure. One evening Pierre is the victim of an accident and goes into a coma. When he awakens, this time he decides to set off to cross France on foot, despite the fact he can barely stand up, following forgotten footpaths, in search of himself and his roots. Sur les chemins noirs will be distributed in Italy in October by Wanted Cinema.
The Festival will close on Saturday 6 May with the premiere of Rispet, the first feature film by Trentino director Cecilia Bozza Wolf, previous winner of an award in Trento for the documentary Vergot in 2017. Filmed entirely with non-professional actors in the Valle di Cembra, Rispet is set in a mountain village surrounded by vineyards, where the inhabitants swear they are one big family, but where there is also a fundamental inability to express emotions and desires, ultimately giving rise to intolerance for diversity. Supported by both regional film commissions, IDM Film Commission Südtirol and Trentino Film Commission, Rispet with be the first premiere presented with the cooperation of Trento Film Festival and Bolzano Film Festival under the new shared label “Tandem”.
Between the opening and closing films, there will be practically daily appointments with the Premieres section, with a further five international films scheduled.
Arriving from Directors’ Fortnight at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, La montagne is the second work by the French director Thomas Salvador, filmed entirely in Chamonix and Mont Blanc, where the protagonist, played by the director himself, takes refuge in the midst of winter to escape from the world. There he seeks a surprising communion with nature and the mountains, giving rise to a fantastical turn of events.
Let the River Flow, by the Norwegian director Ole Giæver, previously present in Trento with Out of Nature, is an impassioned reconstruction of the Sami people’s fight for their rights and against the forced relocation caused by the construction of a huge dam across the River Alta in the 1970s. The battle is considered to be one of the key moments in the founding of the global ecologist movement.
From environmental themes, today central to the cultural programme, the Festival returns to its traditional subject matter: mountaineering. Heights and Depths by Sandor Csoma, a Hungarian feature film seeing its international premiere in Trento, is inspired by the true story of the great climber Zsolt Erőss. He went missing in 2013 on Kangchenjunga, a mountain he had succeeded in scaling despite having an artificial right leg, having lost his limb three years earlier in an accident in the mountains. The whole affair is narrated from the point of view of his wife Hilda Sterczer, also a climber, who is powerless to help and obliged to follow her husband’s fate from thousands of kilometres away, dealing with her grief alone with her two children.
The last two films further extend the perspective of the Premieres section and the spectrum of the Festival programme as a whole. The acclaimed Manodopera by Alain Ughetto, which has received extensive recognition, including the award for Best Animated Feature Film at the 2022 European Film Awards, is an extraordinary animated film for adults made entirely with miniature sets and puppets. Following the adventures of his family, the director retraces the history and drama of Italian emigration across the Alps, in search of work and fortune in France. Also presented at the Annecy, Locarno and Rotterdam festivals, among others, Manodopera will be distributed in Italian cinemas by Lucky Red. Lastly, the traditional “midnight” appointment with genre and cult film will screen Mad Heidi, by Johannes Hartmann and Sandro Klopfstein, an apocryphal and splatter version of the ultimate Swiss legend, where instead of the alpine idyll of the novel and the cartoon that we are used to, there is a dystopian vision of Switzerland, which has fallen under the authoritarian rule of a wicked cheese tyrant, against whom Heidi will lead a bloody revolt.
The full film programme for Trento Film Festival (28 April – 7 May), including the films in all the sections, will be announced on 4 April at a press conference, and will be made available immediately afterwards at the website www.trentofestival.it.
Advance sale of tickets and season tickets for the films will begin on 21 April, both online and at cinema ticket offices.
