Yes, we’ve often been asked why Italy’s leading festival of the noir genre up and left Courmayeur right after celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary. There’s a practical reason -different priorities on the part of the Valle d’Aosta and its promotional strategies, and on the part of a festival and its own identity as both pure entertainment and a cultural showcase. But there’s a deeper reason: it’s time for the festival template to get a makeover, with new guidelines that put the audience - a new audience - center-stage. So it makes sense to retire the formula of the "niche festival" to take on an utterly new challenge that places Noir in an urban context with a major university as its point of reference. After all, the idea of a sort of in-built nomadism and a shedding of skin, reflected in content, is practically a hallmark of the noir genre. It perfectly expresses that restlessness, that penchant for risk and thrill-seeking that generations of readers and audiences have identified with, projecting their own dreams and nightmares which are in turn rooted in the collective unconscious and our social ills.
The black panther, with its wild, duplicitous gaze, debuts as the symbol of the new Noir in Festival this year, running from Thursday, December 8th to Wednesday, December 14th, first in Como and then in Milan, with a very special pre-opening event at which Roberto Saviano will receive the Raymond Chandler Award (December 7th at Como’s Teatro Sociale), and a surprise closing event on Thursday the 15th (in the IULM University’s auditorium), the final of the Fight Cult game devoted to Italian noir films in the new millennium.
Those eyes of our panther, an indirect homage to Cat People with David Bowie’s theme song (but also to director Paul Schrader, 1982, and his predecessor Jacques Tourneur in 1942) contain all the kaleidoscopic shades of noir that make up our festival’s new identity, with its sensibility for all possible combinations and mutations of the genre, embracing film, literature and television; along with the graphic novel, history, and crime news.
There’s no doubt that a figure who epitomizes this evolution is Tim Burton, the most ingenious and unpredictable of the master filmmakers who work the genre like a "dark fairy tale" that reflects all the dreams of nightmares of audiences today. Noir pays homage to him this year with a special evening event built around Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
We have an impressive guest list for our upcoming edition, with confirmed appearances by: Adriano Giannini and Pascal Bonitzer, Dario Argento and Gabriele Salvatores, Gianrico Carofiglio and Carlo Lucarelli, Pino Insegno and Vinicio Marchioni, Jean François Richet and Johnnie To, Mai Jia and Donato Carrisi, Massimo Carlotto and Jesper Stein, Maurizio De Giovanni and Claudio Amendola - to be continued.
The program features eight films in competition this year, plus five out-of-competition events, two auteur short films, three different retrospectives (in collaboration with the Italian Film Library), and a special initiative conceived by Istituto Luce - Cinecittà devoted to crime and crime news as they play out in Lombardy. A presentation of Gianfranco Giagni’s latest film, Le scandalose, rounds out the event.
We have lined up fifteen crime writers to hold our daily Conversations scheduled in both Como and Milan, including many stars on the contemporary publishing scene, with the addition of an entire morning program focusing on reporters/authors and real crime news vs. novels and true crime; lastly, talks with the authors shortlisted for the Giorgio Scerbanenco Award, which moves to Milan in 2016 - fittingly, the adopted home of the founder of the Italian noir.
Noir can boast four venues in 2016: the splendid Teatro Sociale in Como; the IULM 6 at the IULM University, along with the Spazio Anteo and the Spazio Oberdan at the Italian Film Library, all in Milan.
Hotly-awaited titles this year include the second film by Claudio Amendola, Il permesso. 48 ore fuori, starring Luca Argentero, the thriller by Johnnie To, Three, Mel Gibson as a solitary avenger in Blood Father, the new entries Iris by Jalil Lespert, starring Romain Duris and Charlotte Le Bon, and Wulu, an African version of, and the darkest of riffs on, Scarface.
Expectation is running just as high for the premieres of three event series from Sky Atlantic: Quarry (based on the novels by Max Allan Collins, with their cult status overseas), The Fall starring Gillian Anderson, (now on its third season), and the French series Le Bureau des Légendes [The Bureau] created by Eric Rochant and starring Mathieu Kassovitz. Then there’s the "faction" The Killing Season, which comes to us from CI: crime+investigation; it’s the brainchild of Alex Gibney.
Lastly, the festival’s final film, the world premiere of Collateral Beauty by David Frankel, starring Will Smith, is the perfect sign-off and seal of success for the first edition in the new era of Noir in Festival.
