“IT’S not easy choosing an opening night film,” curator Elysia Zeccola says as she prepares for the 2022 Italian Film Festival, opening in Canberra on September 14.

“It has to be sourced from the best of the last year’s films and some years there are films that are too heavy to run on opening.

“But our aim for opening night is just for people to be entertained – we all need a laugh after the last couple of years.”

Zeccola’s on to a sure thing this year with the opening night choice, “Belli Ciao”, starring the famous Italian comedy duo Pio and Amedeo as former friends who reunite in their hometown in Puglia after years apart, resulting in an entertaining north-versus-south culture clash. 

That north-south divide has, over the years, been a never-ending source of opening-night movies and that, she says, is because it’s something people feel strongly about.

Zeccola says: “It’s just like Melbourne north of the river versus south of the river or Sydney versus Melbourne, or Australia versus NZ.” 

She has discovered that the queen city of the south, Naples, is the source of incredible film talent, to say nothing of its superb locations, so she’s created a sub-theme called “A spotlight on Naples, the heartbeat of Italian cinema”.

“There’s so much coming out of Naples,” she says, including her very favourite choice, Mario Martone’s “Nostalgia”, direct from the Cannes Film Festival and starring Pierfrancesco Favino. 

“Naples is almost like a character in the film – it’s very atmospheric,” she says. 

The southern city will also be seen in “The Great Silence”, “The Perfect Dinner” and the closing-night choice, Vittorio De Sica’s 1963 classic, “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”, starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni playing different couples in three stories – first in Naples, then in Rome and Milan. “What better way to end the festival with Sophia and Marcello?” Zeccola asks.

Another focus in this year’s festival is a retrospective on the notorious director Pier Paolo Pasolini through screenings of his films of adapted literary works: “The Canterbury Tales”, “Arabian Nights” and “The Decameron”.

She is proud of the documentary component of the festival, singling out “Ennio: El Maestro”, the life story of film composer Ennio Morricone. She was astonished to find that when he was studying composition, his lecturers looked down on him as film scoring was considered lowbrow, so much so that when working on the early “spaghetti westerns”, he used a pseudonym. 

Zeccola admits to having a few personal favourites with “The Code of Silence” high on her list. It’s about a young woman, played by Lina Siciliano, who has grown up in a Mafia family.

She’s also secured two films fresh from the big international festivals. One of them, “Lord of the Ants,” a bio-pic about Italian poet Aldo Braibanti, jailed because of fascist-era homophobic laws.

The other, “The Hummingbird”, is based on the 2019 novel by Sandro Veronesi and has been honoured with a rare gala night at the Toronto Film Festival. 

The Italian Film Festival, September 14-October 12.