– The festival’s 10th edition, which is unspooling in Novi Ligure between 5 and 10 May, is opening with the documentary about the newly elected Hungarian Prime Minister, Peter Magyar
Spring Wind – The Awakening by Tamás Yvan Topolánszky and Claudia Sümeghy
The 10th edition of the Riviera International Film Festival, unspooling in Sestri Levante, Liguria, between 5 and 10 May, will open with an international premiere of the documentary revolving around Peter Magyar, in the presence of the newly elected Hungarian Prime Minister himself. Spring Wind – The Awakening, directed by Tamás Yvan Topolánszky and Claudia Sümeghy and documenting the rise of the anti-Orbán politician who triumphed in the Hungarian elections on 12 April, is shaping up to be a veritable film event: “Spring Wind has become the most watched Hungarian documentary of all time in cinemas”, Maygar himself stressed on social media when announcing his participation in the Ligurian festival. “[…] it’s had 3.3 million views on YouTube in 2 days and it’s been leading the HBO audience ratings for two weeks”. The film will be presented out of competition.
“No Risk, No Stories” is the slogan chosen for the tenth anniversary edition of the festival, whose stated aim is to lend space to films and stories which are brave enough to step outside of their comfort zones. Ten films have been selected in competition, representing 14 countries from around the world and, as a rule, they’re all directed by filmmakers under 35. They range from the German dramas Karla by Christina Tournatzés, A Fading Man by Welf Reinhart and Six Weeks On by Jacqueline Jensen, to the Estonian title Fränk by Tõnis Pill and Lithuania’s Renovation by Gabriele Urbonaite, by way of Gemma Blasco’s Spanish film Fury, a Guadalupan crime film (Zion by Nelson Foix) and David and Eric Cummings’ English-French thriller Legionario, which sees a French soldier forced to return to his native Colombia to face up to his past as a guerrilla soldier in the FARC. The selection is rounded off by two US comedies (Idiotka by Nastasya Popov and Fior di latte by Charlotte Ercoli).
The documentaries competition will showcase ten titles hailing from Switzerland, England, Ukraine, Belgium and Italy, as well as Canada, the USA, Brazil and Australia. From the Old Continent we’ll see Iceman by Corina Gamma, centring on Koni Steffen, a glaciologist who vanished among the crevices of Greenland in 2020; Rhino by Tom Martienssen, which revolves around the battle to save black rhinos from extinction; Second Wind by Masha Kondakova, telling the story of five heroes who are rewriting the definition of impossible, from the battlefields of Ukraine to the outermost reaches of Africa; Attraverso i nostri occhi by Marco Marras, which sees actress Caterina Murino crossing Sardinia to document the stray animals crisis, and Eat More Trees by Arne Forcketyn, focused on the phenomenon of desertification.
Eye-catching out-of-competition screenings include a premiere of Peter Marcias’s Quasi Grazia, which is based on the life of Nobel Prize writer Grazia Deledda and is set to be presented in Sestri by its lead actress Laura Morante. And, last but not least, are the four masterclasses featuring in the line-up, courtesy of Matthew Modine, Giovanni Veronesi, Stephen Frears and Silvio Soldini, and the talk on The Voice of Hind Rajab, whose protagonist Saja Kilani and casting agent Lara Abul Failat will reflect on how the film has helped to challenge the boundaries between the act of documentation, activism and art.
(Translated from Italian)
