The Festival Cinemambiente will be in Turin from the 11th till the 16th of October. Here’s an extract from the introduction text of Gaetano Capizzi, director of Cinemambiente Festival:
“Tenth edition, ten great documentaries in the International Competition, the same number in the Italian Competition and in the one for the Short Animations, that added to the ones in the various Focuses, Panoramas, Ecokids and Tributes, make for a program of over a hundred and twenty films. In the time that has acted as the backdrop to our little big history, a lot of things have changed. The state of the environment seems to have got worse: pictures painted as future scenarios have become reality. The great global warming emergency, with the disastrous consequences of climate change, is now here for all to see. This year environmental refugees outnumber those fleeing from war zones. The long-feared depletion of fossil fuels creates continual conflicts, most of them armed. The unstoppable growth in the production of goods, caused by the explosive industrial development of China and India, poses disturbing questions about a future now near. On the positive side, there’s increased public awareness and, even if a little timidly, these issues are finally making their way onto the political agendas of the world’s governments.
Cinema, in its dual role of representing the common feeling and constructing the collective imagination, has reacted to the situation by producing a great number of well-made films dealing with environmental themes, to the point of creating an environmental genre within social documentaries.[...]
In this tenth edition, for the first time we are not presenting a retrospective. Not only the documentary cinema of Robert Flaherty, Joris Ivens, Jean Rouch, Vittorio De Seta (all authors whose films we’ve presented), but cinema fiction as well, from the classic western about colonizing the new frontier to post-atomic, catastrophic science fiction, have dealt with the subject of nature in its beauty or its cruelty, and man’s relationship with it. The awareness of the destruction of the environment and the consequent cultural movements are relatively recent, going back barely 20-30 years, and only very recently are becoming a mass phenomenon. From this, the cinema has begun to develop a different way of presenting nature, the landscape. No longer “nature cinema”, but a more conscious “environmentalist cinema”, aware that the problem today is the destruction of nature by man. How can you portray the passage of seasons with a climate gone mad? How can you believe positively in science as progress (Ivens) when confronted with such environmental disasters?
These considerations, along with a conviction of the urgency of the themes, brought us this year to give space to this modern “environmentalist cinema”, to the detriment of retrospectives. The Festival, after ten years of history, is the only one in the country that attempts to conjugate civil commitment and cinematographic quality investigating the new frontiers of the cinema and the environmental question, which increasingly encapsulates the themes of human rights. Rights to the environment, access to resources, to peace, to security and well-being, are more than ever woven together to form a single knot, that acts as the development model for modern society.”
