Italian cinema will be celebrated across Ireland in the coming weeks as NICE kicks off a series of festival events in Limerick, Dublin, Cork and Galway. The 4th edition of the NICE Italian Film Festival comes to Limerick for the first time today as these screenings start off, running from 27th March to 6th April.
NICE (New Italian Cinema Events) has promoted contemporary Italian film across the world for more than 30 years, and this spring they’ll be bringing 22 screenings to four cities in 2025 with support from the Italian Institute of Culture.
Those screenings will be comprised of 10 feature films. Among the festival’s programme this year is the latest from Paulo Sorrentino, Parthenope. The coming-of-age story finds the beautiful Parthenope searching for love in the heady, hot summers and endless nights of her youth in Naples, Italy, as she falls for the city’s many unforgettable characters and finds herself in the adventures that make up a lifetime.
Also showing is Diamanti (Diamonds), directed by Ferzan Özpetek. A director summons his favourite actresses, those he has worked with and those he has loved. Between loneliness, passions, anxieties, heartbreaking failures and unbreakable bonds, reality and fiction interpenetrate, as do the lives of the actresses with those of the characters, competition with sisterhood, the visible with the invisible.
In Francesco Costabile’s Familia, Luigi Celeste is twenty years old, living with his mother Licia and his brother Alessandro. The three are united by a deep bond. It has been almost ten years since any of them has seen Franco, partner and father, who made the two boys’ childhood and Licia’s youth a memory of fear and abuse. One day Franco returns, he wants his children back, he wants his family back, but he is a man who poisons everything he touches and makes those he loves prisoners of his shadow. The story of Luigi and his family is a one that reaches the bottom of the abyss to make a path to rebirth, whatever the cost.
Cristina Comencini’s Il treno dei bambini (The Children’s Train) is a post-war period piece. Amerigo is eight years old and has never left Naples and his mother Antonietta. His world, consisting of the streets and poverty, is however about to change. On board one of the so called ‘trains of happiness’ he will spend the winter in the north, where a young woman, Derna, will take him in and take care of him. Next to her, Amerigo gains an awareness that leads him to a painful choice that will change his life forever. It will take him many years to discover the truth: those who love you do not hold you back, but let you go.
L’abbaglio (The Illusion) meanwhile is set in 1860. Giuseppe Garibaldi began the adventure of the Thousand from Quarto, surrounded by the enthusiasm of young idealists who had come from all the regions of Italy, and with his faithful group of officers, among whom a new profile stands out, that of the Palermo colonel Vincenzo Giordano Orsini. Among the many soldiers recruited were two Sicilians, Domenico Tricò, a peasant who had emigrated to the North, and Rosario Spitale, an illusionist.
Adele Tulli’s doc Real aims to provide a modern digital landscape. The film explores the transformation of human experience in the digital era through the daily life of a series of characters grappling with a hyper-connected world. Romantiche is a comedic anthology assembled by actor/director Pilar Fogliati, Una storia nera is a dark story of distrust and disappearance, and Vittoria by Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman is a character study looking inside the complexity of family dynamics through one woman’s experiences.
Gloria! by Margherita Vicario is one of the festival’s banner films, showing twice as an opener and once as a closer. Set in a women’s institute in Venice in the late 1700s, the film tells the story of Teresa, a young woman with visionary talent, who, together with a small group of extraordinary female musicians, bypasses the centuries and defies the dusty cathegories of the Ancien Régime by inventing a rebellious, light and modern music. Gloria! is about the imagination and talent of all the many women composers who, like pressed flowers, are hidden in the pages of history.
This year a collaboration with the Limerick School of Art and Design (LSAD) will see the Festival branch out as it starts out, with a series of four screenings in Limerick between 27 and 29 March, taking place at the TUS Millenium Theatre, Moylish Campus. They’ll be screening Romantiche, Parthenope, Real, and Gloria! These screenings are free with reservation on Evenbrite.
In Dublin, seven features will screen between 3-6 April at the Point Odeon and the Light House Cinema. The former will begin the fair city of film’s leg of the festival on Thursday 3rd with Gloria!, followed by a Q&A with the actors and a reception after the film’s screening. Over in Smithfield, Diamanti, Una storia nera, L’abbaglio, Real and Romantiche will screen in the Light House over the weekend, culminating in a closer of Parthenope and another actor Q&A. Tickets for Gloria! are €9 + fees via Eventbrite, you can book the other films for €11 (€10 concessions) via the Light House.
The Arc is the host in Cork for NICE, with Parthenope the opener in the Rebel County. Their screening of that film is on 4th April, and will be followed by a Q&A with the actors and another reception event. Familia, Diamanti, Il treno dei bambini, Romantiche and L’abbaglio will follow through to the 6th April at the Cork City cinema. Tickets there are Matinée €10.75 for matinées, €12.50 for evenings ( €8/€9 for students) and are available to book from the Arc.
The Eye opens up for NICE over in Galway that weekend, with Gloria! again the opener on the 4th, followed by Vittoria, Parthenope, Real and Diamanti the selection in the west, and here tickets are €10 (€9 for seniors), with more info and tickets available here.
No two locations have quite the same collection, spreading these new Italian films to different audiences across the island. You can see the full layout and lineup of the NICE Festival across Ireland over at their website.