THE 21st Italian Film Festival is bound to confirm all over again the extraordinary hold Italian film-makers have on cinematic art. 

With a change of coffee-makers as principal partner, it’s Lavazzo no longer and now called The ST. ALi Italian Film Festival, bookended by the live-action version of “Pinocchio” starring Roberto Benigni to open, and Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Malèna”, starring Monica Bellucci, to close. 

Benigni, best known as the star of the 1997 film “Life Is Beautiful” for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor, plays the woodcutter Geppetto, who fathers/makes the puppet Pinocchio, who wants to become a real boy.

Garrone’s highly theatrical version of the children’s tale by Carlo Collodi is being billed as a “gothic masterpiece”, mixing the grotesquery of the story’s famous characters, the Cat, the Fox and the Cricket, with a gritty realism that shows the impoverished life of the working people in feudal Tuscany.

The closing film, “Malèna”, has been chosen in memory of film composer Ennio Morricone, who died in July this year. Set during World War II, the film shows 13-year-old Renato besotted with Malèna, the most beautiful woman in a small Sicilian town and the subject of malicious gossip.

Morricone’s soundtrack to “Malèna” was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score and the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score and the title track has been recorded by Yo-Yo Ma.

Made in 2000, it is one of 13 feature films for which Morricone composed the score that was directed by Giuseppe Tornatore.

In all, he wrote more than 400 scores for the screen and 100 classical works, with credits for all Sergio Leone’s films since “A Fistful of Dollars”, all Tornatore’s films since “Cinema Paradiso” and movies as unalike as “Exorcist II” and “The Untouchables”.

His score to “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” is one of the most recognisable of all soundtracks in history.

Sandwiched in between these two classics is a festival mix of crime, comedy, social realism and psychological drama.

Marco Bellocchio’s “The Traitor”, a big winner at Italy’s 65th David di Donatello Awards, shows Pierfrancesco Favino playing a Sicilian Mafia boss-turned-police informer.

In a double whammy for actress-turned-director Jasmine Trinca, we’ll be seeing Ferzan Ozpetek’s new film “The Goddess of Fortune”, where Trinca plays a mother who leaves her kids with two gay friends when she falls ill, screening alongside her own short film, “Being My Mom”, a mother and daughter’s journey through a deserted Rome.

A special presentation screening is “Martin Eden”, writer and director Pietro Marcello’s take on Jack London’s 1909 novel about an outspoken writer at a pivotal moment in Italy’s pre-war history.

Comedy highlights include Neapolitan romantic comedy “7 Hours To Win Your Heart”, where a group of desperate men in Turin attempt an armoured truck robbery and “Once Upon A Time… in Bethlehem”, where comedy duo Ficarra and Picone star as a thief and a priest who are magically transported to Palestine to make sure the birth of Jesus follows its course.

As in all good film festivals, the kids are not forgotten. For age 15 and over, there’s “My Brother Chases Dinosaurs” and for all ages, “The Most Beautiful Day In The World”, where a luckless theatre manager receives a strange inheritance, the custody of two children, only to discover that one of them has amazing telekinetic powers. 

Both those films are recommended in a curiously Italian subsection of the program – “Nonna-Friendly Films”.

The 21st Italian Film Festival, Palace Electric, NewActon, October 1-18, book at italianfilmfestival.com.au