A New Dawn for Italian Cinema in the UK

By Beverly AndrewsOutside film festivals and most notably the BFI Film festival in the UK, it can be a difficult task to watch foreign language cinema. But an initiative launched by CinemaItaliaUK hopes to now make Italian cinema far more accessible to British audiences through their new initiative, the CinemaItaliaUK player. Launched in December, the player will make both Italian classics, as well as contemporary releases available to UK audiences. And in the process introduce an entire generation to the wonders of Italian cinema.

Some of the directors whose films will feature on the player include cinema giants such as Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica as well as Michelangelo Antonioni alongside lesser known but no less heralded directors such as Sergio Corbucci as well as contemporary cinema favourites such as Luca Guadagnino the director of Call Me by Your Name. Some of the titles available are the original Django directed by Corbucci, as well as perhaps one of the best-known Italian titles of all time 8 ½ directed of course by Italian cinema god Federico Fellini, alongside these will also be lesser-known films such as Ettore Scola’s rarely screened A Special Day with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.

A Special Day is an extraordinary if critically overlooked film, which documents the historic visit to Italy of Adolph Hitler, who went there as a guest of Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. These dark figures from history are not though the film’s focus, but rather the communities their rule destroyed, the political left in their respective countries, Germany and Italy’s queer communities and above all the women, who were expected to no longer pursue independent lives but to simply produce as many children as possible for the state. With populist leaders on the rise around the world, A Special Day serves as a timely warning.