Italian Film Directors turning to the web

April 20, 2009 The New York Times
Italians Look to Small Screen
taken in large part from an article by ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

There has been a conspicuous shift in the Italian film industry — from the big screen to the computer screen. Several of the best-known Italian directors have turned their lenses to making short movies for the Internet. Some have been lured by commercial projects, others by the opportunity to tell poignant stories in a condensed form. And in a country with one of the lowest levels of Internet access in Europe, for many it is the first time they have flirted with the medium.

For one such project, Sorrentino and four other top directors created short videos for the Web version of La Repubblica, the daily paper in Rome, after the earthquake that ravaged Abruzzo this month. http://tv.repubblica.it/dossier/registi-macerie

“We call them, ‘documentart-eries’ because it’s difficult to define them otherwise,” said Gregorio Botta, a deputy editor at La Repubblica who spearheaded the initiative, which he said underscored “the important interconnection that exists between the newspaper and the Web site.” The five La Repubblica shorts, which started being posted two days after the April 6 earthquake, succinctly capture the devastation wrought by the natural disaster and the acts of heroism and humanity of survivors and their determination to rebuild their homes and their lives. For his heart-wrenching video of one of the earthquake victims, the Turkish-born Italian transplant Ferzan Ozpetek traveled to Abruzzo with members his regular feature film crew. “I am always meticulous, and this time I felt the responsibility of helping a group of people,” he said.

For another project, the legendary filmmaker Ermanno Olmi joined with Gabriele Salvatores, an Oscar winner, and with the winner last year of the Cannes Jury Prize, Paolo Sorrentino, to shoot three short films for the largest Italian bank, Intesa Sanpaolo. The films for Intesa Sanpaolo, which are to play in full or in trailer versions in movie theaters around Italy until the end of the month [May 2009], are part of a “PerFiducia” — Have Faith — campaign and the bank’s “intent to recount the positive and vital forces that animate our country,” according to the PerFiducia Web site. http://www.perfiducia.com/#/homepage “We wanted to do something useful to contrast the negative mood that was growing in people, because apart from the economic crisis there is also a widespread crisis of faith in the future,” said Vittorio Meloni, head of internal relations for Intesa Sanpaolo. This was not the moment for a traditional ad campaign touting a bank’s merits, he said. “It’s enough for us that people ask, ‘Why did the bank do this?’ Because the answer implies that we are more than just a bank.”

For directors, working for the Web offers greater freedom from the constraints of the big screen or television, and an immediacy and visibility that is potentially unparalleled, compared with theatrical releases. But the essence of movie making does not change, said Francesca Comencini, who directed her first Web short about a group of women in a destroyed Abruzzo village for La Repubblica. “In theory, the means shouldn’t define the content,” she said. “The ethics are the same.” The issue was widely debated in Italy years ago, when film directors began to make television commercials, she added. “But in the end they made products that were exquisitely cinematographic,” she said.

The burgeoning genre has already spawned a festival. The Babelgum Online Film Festival, with Spike Lee as host, is an offshoot of the Britain-based online content site founded by an Italian billionaire, Silvio Scaglia, “to nurture new filmmaking talent,” and put the work of traditional filmmakers online, said Babelgum’s media relations director, Andrea Giannotti.

The level of access to the Internet in Italy is tied with Portugal at second-worst in Europe, ahead of only Russia, according to comScore. Even so, more than 400,000 viewers have watched the Intesa Sanpaolo films on the site, Meloni said.