Si vive una volta sola” [You only live once], the new comedy by Carlo Verdone, produced and distributed by Luigi and Aurelio De Laurentiis’ Filmauro, is the story of an incoherent road trip around Southern Italy by a medical team made up of excellent professionals who, in addition to their work, share an unexpected passion for practical jokes and ruthless team pranks.
You can bet that we will see some sensational things, the first of which is down to Verdone himself who chose Puglia, or rather different aspects of Puglia, for the set, where he worked last summer: from Bari to Monopoli, from San Vito di Polignano to Otranto and the province of Lecce, Castro, Sant’Andrea, Porto Badisco, Santa Cesarea Terme and Serrano.
A three-party wager which involves the participation, alongside the production company, of PugliaPromozione and the Apulia Film Commission [AFC] which supported the movie and decided to take the promotional strategy a step further.

While previously this had mainly concentrated on attending international festivals and markets, with “Si vive una volta sola” it actually ‘enters’ the movie both through a verbal mention of Puglia, which will play a significant role in the screenplay where it is explicitly mentioned as the holiday destination of the four protagonists; as well as through press advertising and joint social network actions with the production which will also provide PugliaPromozione and the AFC with some backstage pictures and footage.

“Si vive una volta sola” could subsequently become part of a new tourist guide dedicated to the Puglie del Cinema, another project that will involve the collaboration of the AFC and PugliaPromozione and envisages the construction of 12 itineraries, two per province, from Gargano to lower Salento passing through Le Gravine and the Itria Valley, linked to the most important films shot in the region.

“Cinema, and art in general, represent an important promotional tool for the area” underlines the Councilor for the Tourism and Cultural Industry at the Regional Government of Puglia, Loredana Capone. “For this reason, as a Councilor I immediately wanted all the agencies to work together.
Because cinema, music, theater and dance are not detached from tourism, on the contrary, they are strategic assets in our economic development. The result is that, today, the number of tourists is growing as well as the number of people employedinthecreativesector”.

Many titles that were made in Puglia are expected in movie theaters over the next few months: lots of big names in the Italian movie industry, including, in addition to Verdone, “Pinocchio” by Matteo Garrone (December 19), “Odio l’estate” by Aldo Giovanni and Giacomo (December 30) and “Tolo Tolo” by Zalone (January 4).
Also, in December Michael Bay’s latest movie, “Six Underground”, will be released on Netflix, many scenes of which were filmed in Taranto. Further ahead the new 007 will also be released in movie theaters as well as the latest offering from Terrence Malick, both filmed in Gravina in Puglia.

The importance of movie tourism initiatives is also one of the points in the Memorandum of understanding that the AFC has stipulated with Film London which envisages AFC’s participation and partnership in the Movie Tourism Conference organized by Film London in the UK capital on November 29. The region’s audiovisual story will also be the subject of a winter school on “place telling” organized by the AFC Centro Studi [Study Center] in collaboration with the University of Salento at the Lecce Cineport from December 10 to 12: a discussion with various theatrical operators on telling stories about places and places as stories.

Returning to the understanding with Film London, this also includes providing support to regional talents through the cross participation of Apulian projects in the New Talent section of the Production Finance Market (PFM) in London – that the AFC also supports financially – and projects from the region in London at the Apulia Film Forum; plus the joint organization of a Co-Pro Talent Lab aimed at a team of around 12 emerging talents from both areas which will take place during the European Cinema Festival in Lecce, from March 30 to April 4 2020.

Alliances with other regions or countries are a crucial element of the Apulia Film Commission’s internationalization strategy, as demonstrated by the CIAK and CIRCE interregional projects aimed at promoting Puglia and neighboring Balkan countries through various actions linked to cinema, such as traveling workshops, short films and conferences.

The Film Commission has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Hengdian group, one of the biggest Chinese private groups which owns around 300 multiplexes for a total of approximately 2,000 screens, as well as the Hengdian World Studios, one of the biggest film studios in the world (visited by around 16 million Chinese tourists in the course of 2017), which has set up an important cinema and television academy in China, the Hengdian College of Film and Television, which today has around four thousand students.

After two editions of “China Insight” at the Bari International Film Festival, at the end of October the Hengdian Film and TV Festival hosted a delegation from the Apulia Film Commission to continue exploring opportunities for collaboration between Italy and China.