Once again everyone likes the format of the festival: moonlight screenings and big names. Applause for Charlotte Rampling, Stellan Skarsgård and Alessandro Gassman. Who says, “This island is a paradise.”
The Aragonese Castle becoming an open-air multiplex cinema in the moonlight, guests landing there in small boats, a common thread represented by the relationship between great cinema and places, represented, evoked, protagonists.
The link between Ischia and art is renewed with cine tourism in Messina
Once again this year, the Ischia Film Festival renewed the deep bond between the island and the seventh art, a bond rooted in a past of great film productions – from the colossal “Cleopatra” to the long epic of Angelo Rizzoli’s “Cineriz” films – and which is alive today more than ever.
In its 22nd edition , the festival directed and conceived by Michelangelo Messina, the first to talk about “cine-tourism,” brought to the attention of the general public national and international auteur works marked by a strong presence of exceptional settings. Because cinema has always made us travel. By imagination, even before literally, directing our choices, suggesting one place instead of another.
The 2024 edition of the Ischia Film Festival
Among previews, celebrated films and works in competition, the Festival hosted a number of film “stars,” most notably Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, former star of such films as “Pirate of the Caribbean” and “Dune,” and the very elegant Charlotte Rampling, former muse of Luchino Visconti, who in his own Ischia lived for a long time, in “The Fall of the Gods,” and made famous, among other things, by her performance in “The Night Porter” by Liliana Cavani. Italy also stars with Neri Parenti, Marco D’Amore, Francesco Di Leva, and Alessandro Gassman, who shared his childhood memories related to Ischia.
“Here,” he said, “I used to come with my father (the famous Vittorio Gassman). Everyone stopped him; he was definitely popular. He loved the Ischian spa, and today I can only share the same feeling for an island that is a true paradise.”
From sunset to late evening, the Aragonese Castle was thus transformed – once again – into a veritable citadel of cinema, as underscored by the social narrative of many of the direct protagonists, each literally thrilled to take part in a collective ritual on an island so inextricably linked to cinema, and in one of its most attractive locations, its legendary castle.
Winning among the feature films was the intense and delicate film “Rosinante” by Turkish director Baran Gunduzalp, which tells the story of a young couple experiencing the drama-now universal-of precarious work and parenthood in a society where the future is fatally marked by uncertainty.
The award for best director, on the other hand, went to “Gondola” by Germany’s Veit Helmer: the film tells the story of the unique friendship between the new cable car attendant of a cable car that connects a village in the mountains with a small town in the valley and the assistant of the “gondola” that travels in the opposite direction. In the “Best of” category, directly reported by the public, “Caracas” by Marco D’Amore, another Ischia regular, won.
Summing up the privileged relationship between the Festival and the Municipality of Ischia, which has always supported it, is the exhibition “Ischia Film Festival, Twenty Years of Cinema Between: Oscar Awards, Exhibitions and Cinetourism,” hosted in the Antiche Terme Comunali.
Already working on Ischia Film Festival 2025
In its history, the Ischia Film Festival has hosted 88,250 spectators, with 2,536 guests: these are great event numbers, which suggest – to cinephiles but not only – to plan their vacations in time by taking inspiration from the dates of the festival. Which will return next year, edition number 23: appointment for the last week of June.
