Let us meet Emma Dante
The Centro di Ricerca per la Narrativa e il Cinema, Banca Sant’Angelo, and Fondazione Curella dedicate a special evening to Emma Dante, the director, screenwriter, and author. The event will be held on Monday, 27th September, at 7:00 pm at the venue of Villa Filippina. There will be a talk with the artist moderated by the cinema historian Alessandro Rais followed by the projection of the film ‘Via Castellana Bandiera’ (2013), the first film of the artist as a director based on her novel of the same name. LET’S MEET EMMA DANTE is one of the off-programme eventswhich will be held during the 43rd edition of the Efebo d’Oro, International Prize for Cinema and Narrative scheduled to be held from 14th to 20th November in Palermo.
Emma Dante, a film director, screenwriter, writer also of fairy tales, who has recently achieved phenomenal success at The Festival d’Avignon, is one of the leading figures at the forefront of Italian culture. A daring and innovative author of pieces for the theatre, mPalermu and the other two fragments of the ‘Trilogy of the Sicilian Family’, namely Carnezzeria and Vita mia, brought her success in 2001. After having written many fictional works and directed for prestigious Operas, she made her debut in the cinema with Via Castellana Bandiera in 2013. In 2020, she made her second film, the multi-awarded ‘Le sorelle Macaluso’, based on her play.
VIA CASTELLANA BANDIERA
by Emma Dante (Italy, Switzerland, France 2013, 94′)
It is a Sunday afternoon. A merciless sirocco is sweeping through Palermo when two women, Rosa and Clara, who have gone there to celebrate a friend’s wedding, get lost in the streets and end up in a very narrow alley, called Via Castellana Bandiera. At the same moment, another car driven by Samira and crammed with the Calafiore comes from the opposite direction and turns into the same alley. Neither Rosa, driving her Multipla car, nor Samira, an old-style and stubborn Albanian woman at the wheel of her Punto, have any intention of letting the other go ahead. Sheltered inside their cars, the two women confront each other in a wordless duel which is worn away through the intimate violence of their stares. It is an all-female duel during which they refuse to drink, eat, or sleep. They prove more obstinate than Palermo’s sun and more stubborn than the ferocity of the men around them. Because, as in any other duel, it is a matter of life or death…
