17 February 2023
Biografilm 2023 will take place in Bologna from June 9 to 19 and in the meantime unveils the first previews of its 19th edition, which will once again be the event to continue celebrating life stories through the medium of documentary, fiction and hybrid cinema. It will also be an opportunity to present the Celebration of Lives Award to some of the great storytellers of the contemporary scene: two of the awardees in the next edition will be Roberta Torre and Nicolas Philibert.
"To Be and To Have", the title of Nicolas Philibert's famous documentary, becomes the leitmotif of this edition of the festival. These two verbs are meant to be the key to the 2023 edition of Biografilm: an invitation to start again from the basics, from the essentials, ideally bringing one's gaze from abstract politics to everyday politics.
Biografilm does so by starting with two essential questions - "Who are we?" and "What do we have?" - to define or redefine one's identity and decide on which cornerstones to base one's existence and the struggles one wants to fight on a daily basis.
In addition, inspired by Nicolas Philibert's documentary, which will be screened again at Biografilm 2023 in the presence of the director (one of the most important voices of the cinema of reality in Europe), the Festival wishes to recognize the work of teachers, crucial figures in the formation of every human being.
Once again this year Biografilm celebrates the great storytellers of the contemporary world through the Celebration of Lives Award. Two of the awardees for the 19th edition will be Roberta Torre and Nicolas Philibert.
Thanks to Roberta Torre, who on Feb. 18 at 1:30 p.m. will be the star of Bristol Talk on the TRC Bologna network (the broadcast will be available for streaming at https://www.bolognaindiretta.it and will be repeated on Sunday 19 at 6:40 p.m. and Friday 24 at 11 p.m.), the Festival celebrates the most surprising and atypical Italian cinema. After winning the Best Director award at IDFA, Europe's most important documentary film festival, with the documentary shot in Emilia-Romagna Le Favolose, the director of Tano da Morire, Sud Side Stori, Angela and Mare Nero, will be with Biografilm audiences in June to share and recount her idea of cinema outside the box, inhabited by the most extravagant and interesting characters, capable of mixing the fairy-tale dimension with the national-popular.
With Nicolas Philibert, the Festival honors the most thoughtful and free European documentary cinema. In fact, Philibert, a landmark in the documentary community for more than 30 years, is considered a master of recounting the human condition through cinema of the real, and has been celebrated with more than 130 retrospectives and tributes around the world. The director of To be and To Have, La Ville Louvre, In the Land of the Deaf, Return to Normandy and Each and Every Moment will arrive at Biografilm to present the Italian premiere of his latest work, On the Adamant, after its world premiere in competition at the Berlinale. Philibert will tell the audience about his curious cinema, which looks at the most diverse and unknown subjects to offer a new view of the world.
In the past, the Celebration of Lives Award has been presented to such personalities as Marina Abramovic, Judith Malina, Charlie Kaufman, Clint Eastwood, Ed Lachman, Michel Gondry, Frederick Wiseman, Michael Madsen, Ulay, Christo, the Coppola family, Gael García Bernal and Jeremy Thomas.
