Istanbul – The 17th Italian Contemporary Cinema Week gets underway in Istanbul, running from September 29 to October 4 at Sinematek/Sinema Evi in Kadıköy and organised by the Italian Cultural Institute. Now one of the most eagerly awaited events devoted to Italian cinema among Istanbul audiences, this year’s festival features seven films that showcase the richness and diversity of contemporary Italian filmmaking. Set in different places and periods, the films explore themes including memory, youth, identity, desire, freedom and the relationship between individuals and society. Together, they offer a way of looking at Italy through the stories it tells about itself, the questions it asks about the present and the anxieties it chooses to bring to the screen. The programme opens with Le città di pianura by Francesco Sossai, a road movie set in the Veneto plain in which a chance encounter between two fifty-year-old men and a young architecture student turns into an unexpected journey of self-discovery. Next comes L’albero by Sara Petraglia, which takes viewers into Rome at night to explore, through the experiences of two young women, the fragile boundaries between friendship, love and dependency. In Elisa, Leonardo Di Costanzo examines the themes of guilt and memory. La Gioia, by Nicolangelo Gelormini, tells the story of a forbidden and fragile relationship, exploring the tension between the need for love and the desire for social redemption. The programme continues with Il Maestro, directed by Andrea Di Stefano and set in the summer of the late 1980s. A journey along the Italian coast undertaken by a young tennis player and his coach becomes an unexpected path towards freedom and the possibility of a new beginning. Duse, directed by Pietro Marcello, brings the figure of Eleonora Duse to the forefront, examining the relationship between art, identity, independence and power during the years marked by the First World War and the rise of fascism. The festival will close with Gioia mia by Margherita Spampinato, which brings together two apparently irreconcilable worlds: that of a child raised in a secular family and immersed in technology, and that of his elderly Sicilian aunt, a deeply religious woman whose world is shaped by legends and superstition. “Presenting these films in Istanbul also means entrusting them to a new audience and another language,” said Andrea Balletta, director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Istanbul. “All the films will be screened in their original language with Turkish subtitles: a process that does not erase differences but allows the stories to cross them. That, after all, is one of cinema’s great privileges and one of the most genuine aims of cultural work: creating opportunities for a perspective born elsewhere to become, for a few hours, surprisingly close.” (9colonne)