The IFF is the only dedicated showcase for new Italian cinema in the
UK and Ireland. Besides a retrospective on diva Alida Valli, the 2009
edition will include a prime selection of contemporary Italian films,
besides an imaginative programme of shorts and documentaries.
The festival Programme will be available in early March.
IFF 2009 will present a special focus on Alida
Valli, an enduring icon from the 1930s onwards.
She has been described as the most beautiful woman in the world
after Greta Garbo.
Most Italian directors of the time were in love with her, and she
was adopted as a national sweetheart. After the war, she found international
stardom in Hollywood, though undoubtedly her best English-language
role was as Anna Schmidt, Harry Lime's grieving girlfriend, in
The Third Man.
Born Alida von Altenburger in Pula, in what is now Croatia but was
then part of the Italian kingdom, Alida moved with her family to
Como, in northern Italy, while still a girl. When her father died,
she and her mother went to Rome, where she enrolled at the capital's
newly inaugurated film school, Centro Sperimentale. In 1936 she
beat four rival students for a small part in I due sergenti
/ The Two Sergeants, directed by Enrico Guazzoni, who had made
the Italian silent film classic, the first Quo Vadis? She
became one of the top stars of Italian cinema, appearing mostly
in comedies or romantic melodramas. Notably she starred in several
European classics, including Senso, a European-set period
piece of romance and betrayal, and Michelangelo Antonioni's Il
Grido or The Outcry (1957), as a weary and impoverished
woman who rejects her working-class lover. During the Second World
War, Ms. Valli hid in a friend's apartment. Others who joined her
were the jazz composer and painter Oscar de Mejo, who became Ms.
Valli's husband. Ms. Valli worked three times with director Bernardo
Bertolucci, memorably as an enigmatic mistress in Strategia
del Ragno, or The Spider's Stratagem (1970), based
on a story by Jorge Luis Borges. She died in Rome on 22 April, 2006.
The focus on one of Italian cinema's great actresses has been made
possible thanks to the help of the Associazione Alida Valli, her
grandson Pierpaolo De Mejo, Cinecittà, and the Brtitish Film
Institute.
Italian Film Festival Limited is a company limited by guarantee, registered in Scotland under registration SC 149118.
Registration address only: 88 Lothian Road, Edinburgh EH3 9BZ.
The company is a charity (SCO 022316), registered in Scotland.
