It is clearly not a coincidence but the result of a work started in 2017 with the new cinema law wanted and promoted by Dario Franceschiniwhich has not only increased public funds and funding for Italian cinema, but has improved the way in which they are given, introducing different merit criteria (both festival prizes, box office and world sales) and in several cases making public support proportional to private investment, that is, the more films cost the more you benefit from government aid.
This has led to a drastic increase in the average quality of that type of cinema that travels the world. Certainly, those who watch fast-paced comedies or low-export films (always made with very low production values and a disheartening aesthetic taste) do not notice this, but all the rest of cinema, starting from the one that runs the festivals around the world, is changed. In the 90s, festivals did not always have Italian films, in the last 20 years we are everywhere.
Traditionally in Italy the ‘festival’ one is considered cinema that doesn’t make a pennyassisted by the state because it cannot stand on its legs and parasitic, because in fact at our box office it collects little and nothing and those films are therefore seen and discussed little and nothing. It is a short-sighted concept, however. In fact, any film selected at one of the main festivals in Europe (Venice, Cannes, Berlin, Locarno etc. etc.) has a very powerful market, it is also sold in 30 to 40 countries if it wins a major award. Countries in which it is certainly not a blockbuster but accumulates small numbers and audiences that, overall, make everything not only sustainable but profitable. There is a business around those movie there, that is, at the very large auteur cinema. The fallout is that then our actors are taken for foreign films (Riccardo Scamarcio has a good career in international productions, so did Favino, Alba Rohrwacher have it, Matilda De Angelis and Luca Marinelli) and the foreign ones come more willingly to us (Piccoli and Turturro have worked with Moretti, Penelope Cruz with Castellitto and Crialese, Dustin Hoffman with Carrisi and just to make the big names but there are many medium-level ones too), more and more productions come to shoot on Italian soil (almost always using Italian workers, spending money on site and taking advantage of our tax breaks for cinema) and this is changing from within our films.
