by Isabella Weber
The 27th edition of Noir in Festival came to a close with the premiere of Todd Haynes’ Wonderstruck. As our international guests made their snowy exit, the Festival took stock of this year’s event: just who were the stars of Noir who ushered in the festival and saw it off?
If we start from the end, Abel Ferrara, who was honored by Giorgio Gosetti in name of Noir in Festival for his contribution to noir films and much more: "Abel Ferrara is a marvelous storyteller of life itself, a citizen of the world, and a visionary genius. With all its myriad shades of noir that depict the mood of our times, the noir community pays homage to a filmmaker who has deepened the spirit and style of noir and given them a contemporary twist."
On Saturday morning, Ferrara had met with Noir audiences and generously shared his thoughts about his own childhood, his career, and his ties to the noir genre, before reflecting on his own role as an artist: "When a film camera is placed between you and the world, it does nothing else but calibrate reality, manipulating it using light, telling its stories. Ever since primitive man was out hunting and gathering, someone always had the task to telling his story, drawing it on the walls of a cave or telling it out loud around the fire. And this is just my own role."
Guest of honor on the closing night of the event, Dario Argento thanked the Festival for being a meeting point and a point of reference for writers and directors working in noir, since its beginnings. It’s where they can get together and strike up new collaborations, in an ongoing dialogue between film, television and literature.
And many filmmakers were on hand in Milan and Como to present their films to Noir audiences. Aitor Arregi, co-director of Handia, winner of the Black Panther Award, told the audience at the Teatro Sociale about how the film came into being. "Jon Garaņo and I got interested in this story gradually; at first we just guessed it had potential. With a storyline involving a giant, we knew we’d be compared with an absolute masterpiece such as The Elephant Man by David Lynch, so we decided to give it a different treatment. Through the story of two brothers, we wanted to show the tension between the Old World and the New World, and the way human beings cope with change."
The Nile Incident Hotel, which earned Fares Fares the award for Best Performance, was presented at the Anteo by its director Tarik Saleh, who admitted to the audience in Milan that it had been next to impossible to get his film into circulation in the Arab world. "In Egypt the film was banned outright, and the kids who defied the ban last week and screened the film in a theater in Cairo were arrested. Three months ago we were invited to the Dubai Festival, but the invite was withdrawn. So this screening this evening is very, very special for me. It’s great to know that you were able to see my film and select it; I can almost see Elio Petri smiling at me from the back of the theater."
The film by Tarik Saleh will be released in Italy by Movies Inspired on February 22, with the title Omicidio al Cairo, and we firmly hope that Saleh, and all the directors at Noir in Festival 2017, will find the large audiences they deserve for their films.
