“It was possible to win. Unfortunately the Oscar campaign didn’t go as it should have gone, we didn’t have the right American distributor who invested what needed to be invested and then, above all, no one told us that we could compete in all the categories. One which makes the difference because it is a race in which not everyone starts on an equal footing. If you run for all the categories you have all ten thousand of the Academy as voters, while for the best foreign film category only a thousand vote.” So at the Bif&st Matteo Garrone takes a few pebbles off his shoes at his master-class at the Petruzzelli Theater after the screening of I Captain which has just competed for the Oscars in the International Film category where it then won The Zone of Interest by the English director Jonathan Glazer.
And again the director still on the Oscar theme: “The English voters are well nine hundred, while the Italians are just over one hundred. In short, with registration in all the categories we would have had a better chance”.
Matteo Garrone, who will receive the Mario Monicelli Award for best director and the Federico Fellini Award for Cinematic Excellence at the Petruzzelli this evening, then adds: “I captain is still a really strange film. It was rejected by some festivals and by many distributors and even the European fund Euroimages, which has generally always supported my films, said no this time. I didn’t have any written reasons, but when I then asked them they told me that it had been rejected: “because it dealt with a so dramatic in an adventurous way.”
And the director of The Embalmer also recalls with amusement what happened in Brussels: “We had a screening in the European Parliament where the film received a long standing ovation. And then, just two weeks later, they held a screening in that same Parliament even worse migrant law.”
Garrone then underlines how this film is a true ‘contemporary Odyssey’: “Reality is much harsher and so I worked by subtraction. Today, then, it must be considered that there is the problem of social media. These African kids are already living virtually in our country thanks to the images we post. Images that make them imagine that everything is easy with us, but that’s not the case.” Luckily there has been “an extraordinary welcome in schools thanks to enlightened teachers. I believe young people can really change things”.
The director then announces that: “in April we will go to Senegal, where it all began, and we will take the film to the most remote villages with mobile screens. That is to say, we will return to where the two debut protagonists, Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall, began their journey.”
Finally, this is how Paolo Del Brocco, CEO of Rai Cinema and Italian co-producer and distributor of Io Capitano, responds to Matteo Garrone’s declarations on possible errors made in promoting the film at the Oscars: “The initial lack of an adequate and important American distributor made so that the film was not entered in all categories”.
Read the full article on ANSA.it
2024-03-17 19:08:00
#Garrone #won #Oscars #mistakes
