Landscape has nothing romantic about it, a landscape strikes us due to its prehistoric appearance, for what it stirs in our innermost selves”.
The definition comes from Werner Herzog; Anna Olivucci, head of the Marche Film Commission, has made it her own and quotes it when she comments on the imminent filming in her region, of “Sarà per un’altra volta”, a short that has a lot to do with the landscape, given that it is set in the Lower Paleolithic Age.

It is not a random quote because the movie, directed by Adriano Giannini, starring Pierfrancesco Favino, is the first project to be supported by the Marche Landscape Cine Fund, the special fund that aims to valorize the landscape though the language of cinema.
Set up by the region through a convention between the Town Planning and Landscape regional technical department and the Marche Film Commission, the Fund has a three year structure and available funds amounting to 78,000 Euros.
With the entrepreneurial imagination that is the necessary baggage of every film commissioner (often forced to make a virtue of necessity), Anna Olivucci intercepted the demand to protect the landscape by articulating it through the ability of audiovisual language to root themes in the collective visual imagination.
“We were very proud”, she tells Cinema & Video International, “to take up the request to promote the landscape and to bring this beyond the making of a documentary, which would have been the most immediate destination, managing, by common assent, to move it towards a structural dimension with a three year Fund, where the landscape is linked to the value of theatrical narration”.

According to Olivucci, reaffirming the efficiency of regional promotion through audiovisuals represents a new path for the regional administration.“You can only produce good policies by starting with a focus on the regional identity”.

The unexpected public success of Martone’s “Giovane favoloso” appears to prove the head of the Marche Film Commission right: it is a movie in which the Marche region renounces its usual characteristic of “averageness” (which has, in any case, allowed it to use its settings for many diverse stories over the years) in order to characterize itself as a landscape with an identity.

It seems to be the ambition of Olivucci and her staff to continue in this direction and they are already working on the second project which will be supported by the Marche Landscape Cine Fund about which they have only revealed that it will be a comedy starring actors who are known and loved by the public at large and will be linked to the region’s overall agricultural-food and wine brand.

THE FILM/A MILLION YEARS AGO
“I discovered “Sarà per un’altra volta” at the Solinas Awards, where I was on the jury”, says Adriano Giannini, the director of the film and its producer along with Andrea Vinci, with Ombla Production: “The screenplay by Sergio Suozzi really struck me but it subsequently failed to be selected for budget reasons. In fact, being a story set in the Lower Paleolithic, it required a lot of makeup work. I didn’t want to film shorts anymore, but I had to make an exception for this story about monkey men, and I bought the idea so that I could re-work it”.
With a budget of 80,000 Euros, the short will be filmed in one week between June and July in the Marche, “which is the ideal set”, comments Giannini, “we found lots of sets there that had not been contaminated by human activity: caves, mountains, hundreds of hectares of land without any buildings”.
“We received a superb welcome from the Marche Film Commission”, adds the producer Andrea Vinci, “they love this story as well and gave us all the necessary support. We will be filming in Sasso Simone and Simoncello, and probably in a cave in Genga, near Frasassi, a perfect location for the film, even though it was not simple to organize”.
The film stars Pierfrancesco Favino, and the cinematographer is Daniele Massaccesi, who has worked with great directors like Spielberg and Scorsese.
“We will also use local resources”, the producer is quick to point out: “the animal trainer who will help with the wolves, Claudio Mangini, is from the Marche”.
Set up in 2008, Ombla Production has already won a Silver Ribbon award for best short for “Il gioco”, Giannini’s directorial debut, based on a story by Andrea Camilleri.