Homate to Friuli Venezia Giulia Region

As is our tradition, once again this year the Veneto Film Festival – an association, which unites numerous Veneto film festivals (the Film Festival della Lessinia has been a member since its founding) – dedicates a small, but heartfelt, tribute to the films of an Italian region. After those devoted to the Abruzzo (2009) and Emilia Romagna (2010), this time the choice fell on Friuli Venezia Giulia, a region described by Ippolito Nievo in his Le confessioni d’un italiano as “a little compendium of the universe, Alpine, flat, and lagoon-filled, in sixty miles from north to south”.

The initiative will include two films and two special guests. With I sentieri della gloria. In viaggio con Mario Monicelli sui luoghi della Grande Guerra, Veneto Film Festival and the Film Festival della Lessinia also wish to remember a master of Italian cinema who left us last November: Mario Monicelli. Along with the director, Gloria De Antoni, we will visit the Friulian locations where the father of Italian comedy filmed his masterpiece, La Grande Guerra (1959), winner of the Leone d’Oro at the 1959 Mostra del Cinema in Venice and nominated for an Oscar the following year. De Antoni, who will meet the Festival public, is a journalist, reporter, writer, and television anchor for RaiTre and RaiUno, as well as a director and documentarist.

Dedicated to the less visible, but no less considerable, part of Friuli Venezia Giulia, and to its caves and the discipline which studies their genesis and conformation, is the speleological documentary, Grottenarbeiter. Alla ricerca del fiume nascosto, by Tullio Bernabei, produced by the Fantastificio of Trieste. Author and director of television documentaries since 1988, Tullio Bernabei, who will accompany his work to Bosco Chiesanuova, has won various international awards in the field. He has conceived and directed numerous programs of a scientific-geological-exploratory nature for the principal television stations in the world. In recent years he has focused on the spread of scientific knowledge for the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology and the Italian Civil Defence Department. A caver and Alpinist since 1975, he has carried out more than fifty scientific explorations and expeditions in many regions of the globe.