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Edoardo Albinati
Italian author and screenwriter Edoardo Albinati is to be the pivotal guest for the Locarno Festival’s 5th springtime event L’immagine e la parola, scheduled for 10 to 12 March 2017. Albinati’s writing is an insightful commentary on contemporary Italy, but has also been responsive to the iconography of film, and so the Festival approached him to draw up a program of talks and screenings which will reveal more about his creative world and explore the rapport between writing and film.
Edoardo Albinati was born in Rome in 1956. Awarded with the famous 2016 Italian literary Prize Strega for his best-selling novel La scuola cattolica has confirmed his status as one of the leading writers in Italy today. Currently being translated into several languages, the book investigates the background of one of the most notorious crimes committed in Italy in the 1970s, the so-called Circeo Murder, the perpetrators of which were among Albinati’s classmates in a private high school in the capital. It presents an overwhelming, lucid and unforgiving analysis of the youths’ education, captured at a time when the centrality of masculinity and the father figure were gradually giving ground in society. Albinati has always been highly focused on issues of education and social conflict and has taught for many years in Rome’s Rebibbia jail, an experience which gave him the material at the center of his novel Maggio Selvaggio, the first to bring him to the attention of the wider reading public.
He has been involved in numerous collaborations with the cinema, starting with the novel Tuttalpiù muoio, co-authored with actor Filippo Timi. He also worked on the screenplays for several movies, including Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales and Fai bei sogni by Marco Bellocchio. The cinema is at the heart of his visual imagination as a writer, revealing his passion for film noir, 1970s directors and films that have become part of the collective imagination.
Carlo Chatrian, Artistic Director of Locarno Festival: “Screenwriter, educator, reporter, playwright, TV writer... Edoardo Albinati personally represents a dizzying range of writing practices, some usually remote from each other. His recent novel La scuola cattolica has also reached dizzy heights, in terms of experimental variety as well as thematic complexity. It’s a book which is a whole world, taking on the task of scanning an entire generation, the author’s own, to provide an anthropological X-Ray. Which explains why we were keen to explore his world in more depth, and to invite him to present it with the help of a selection of films – and an accomplice or two. Although we’re only at the start of this adventure, we’re quite sure that his words, his voice and the choice of titles will be as surprising and engaging as the books and films he has written.”
The forthcoming 5th edition of L'immagine e la parola, with Carlo Chatrian as Artistic Director and curated by film critic Daniela Persico, is part of the Primavera Locarnese spring-time season.
Further details about the program and events will be announced at the press conference to be held in Locarno on 20 February.
Taking part in the master classes of L'immagine e la parola there will also be the Laboratorio di Adattamento Cinematografico organized by the CISA film school in partnership with TorinoFilmLab, from Friday 10 to Wednesday 15 March.