“ A Ciambra” by Jonas Ash Carpignano will be representing Italian cinema in the selection for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
The film, which won the Europa Cinemas Label at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs during the last Cannes Film Festival, is the second feature movie by the thirty-two year old Italian-American director.
It is about a Roma community that arrives in Gioia Tauro in southern Italy from Slovenia and is told through the story of a young boy, Pio, and his friendship with an African immigrant. It has already won, amongst other things, the Discovery Prize at the Cannes Film Festival (Semaine de la Critique, 2014) and also received a special mention at the Nastri D’Argento. e screenplay for the feature was developed with the support of the Cinefondation Residence du Festival du Cannes, the Torino Film Lab (which gave it the Artè award) and the Semaine de la Critique’s Next Step Program.
Produced by Martin Scorsese and released in Italy at the end of August with Academy Two, “A Ciambra” was also funded through the Lu.Ca. open call, a project set up last September with a memorandum of understanding between Basilicata and Calabria to collaborate on specific projects that can be realized in the two regions through their respective Film Commissions.
It is worth emphasizing that the newest Italian cinema, the part that circulates around the festivals and obtains international recognition – a very recent example is “Easy” by Andrea Magnani, which won an award at Annecy Cinéma Italien – almost always bears the imprint of the territory, under the competent direction of the Film Commissions. It is a cinema built with professionalism, piece by piece, through taxing co-production agreements that do not break box o ces but travel around the world.
In fact, “A Ciambra”, co-produced by Rai Cinema together with Stayblack Productions, RT Features and Sikelia Productions, already has a distribution arrangement in Germany, with DCM Film Distribution, and in France with Haut et Court.
Paola Malanga, Deputy Director and Product Manager at Rai Cinema, greeted the candidacy of “A Ciambra” as a “gamble on cinema of the present and of the future that makes no distinction between documentary and drama”; and Jonas Carpignano, in Italy, “is certainly the pioneer of this new type of cinema”.