Giffoni Valle Piana, July 22, 2023 – Charles Verdone Meet the hundreds of children at the Giffoni Film Festival. And it is a strange encounter: between children, who often have the maturity and critical sense of adults, and him, Verdone, an adult who somewhere hides a boy’s heart. i am with him St. John – the singer Giovanni Damian – e Ludovica Martinoprotagonists with him from “Life with Charles”whose second season will be released on September 15th on Paramount+.
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Giffoni Film Festival 2023: the programme. highlights and guests
Giffoni is a town that revolves around its festival in mid-July: a children’s film festival born in the ’70s that has grown over time into an impressive international event. Waiting in front of the room named after the director François Truffaut, hundreds of teenagers. “I know all the Verdone films, my favorite is ‘Borotalco’,” says a fourteen-year-old girl. “I like the way he writes stories, I especially like his stories.” Another – while everyone is waiting in the heat – says, “My favorite is ‘Green, Red’…no, ‘Green,White’…no, ‘White, Red and Verdone’.” I’ve always seen his films with my parents, actually they’re coming today too. I grew up with his films. I like his way of caricaturing himself, his self-mockery.” “We see him a bit like a grandfather.” It’s as if the background were Sunday afternoons with the family, you sit on the sofa and it’s hot in summer and you watch a Verdone film.” But there are also the boys and girls who came for Sangiovanni. They stand by the railing waiting for an autograph—old-fashioned, many with open notebooks—or a selfie.
And finally they arrive. In the very full Truffaut room we see a short excerpt from the second season of “Vita da Carlo”. Then Verdone confirms: “Yes, Sangiovanni will play me as a young man“. And he begins to tell a rather whimsical background, or rather: rather ‘Verdonian’. “I had decided to tell an episode in ‘Vita da Carlo’ that occupied me as a boy and which I had already included in my book ‘The Caress of Memory’. So I needed a young, twenty-year-old me. The producers offered me Sangiovanni, whom I didn’t know: they told me he had a lot of followers, and they basically said to me: either you take him or we don’t do the series.” At first I was a little less, then I realized his great qualities. It is a Verdone from Veneto, but – as you will see – exceptional. I think he will have a future as an actor too.”
A sixteen-year-old girl asks Verdone an articulate, adult question. Remember how Verdone did it in his early twenties a show for one spectator onlyHe thought it was the last of his “career”. As it turned out later, this viewer was the critic of a major newspaper. What would Verdone have done if he hadn’t been an actor? In reality, Verdone has been Verdone for too many years, an icon of the entertainment world. That its human truth and its cinematic mask coincide. Perhaps he forgot what he was going to become: perhaps a doctorate in theology.
Another girl from Basilicata says she loves “Vita da Carlo” because “it emphasizes that behind the public figure there is a person. And that makes it clear.” Actors are not unbreakable statues: and often public figures experience a loss of their daily lives…”. Verdone is impressed: “How old are you?” “Sixteen,” says the girl. “Bravo. you have a future I think you could be a film critic.” “In the first season of Vita da Carlo, 70 percent was the truth: I didn’t want to hide my weaknesses, my weaknesses. I’ve tried to tell you how you are. This is important: be honest. And don’t think that a film is a business, don’t think of the millions you’re managing somehow.” The last girl comes from London and asks him what his position is on that strike by American actors. “You’re right, I’m on your side. If we get to the point where they create actors with artificial intelligence or – which is already happening in a way – artificially rejuvenate them by fifty years, I think that’s the death of auteur cinema. If they want to demand the rights to my image to make films with my thirty-year-old face, I will resist them. But also the algorithms To “captivate” the public with the “most appropriate” ending are the death of the authors, the death of the invention, the death of fantasy. When artificial intelligence writes the stories, our work is finished, the art is finished, the cinema is finished, everything is finished.” However, the children are not artificial. They are not a virtual audience: they are personal stories from around the world, they are living emotions. Verdone seems a little moved at the presentation of the Giffoni film festival awards.