Italiano
Il camorrista – La serie by Giuseppe Tornatore will be presented in a preview screening on Thursday October 26th at the eighteenth Rome Film Fest. The series in five episodes – a never-broadcast television version of the filmmaker’s debut film – comes back to light thanks to Titanus, Mediaset and Minerva, and the restoration supervised by Tornatore himself: the public is invited to view the first and fourth episodes at 7 pm in Sala Sinopoli.
The following day, the filmmaker, winner of an Oscar® and of the Grand Prix at Cannes for Nuovo cinema Paradiso, will be a guest of the Rome Film Fest for an encounter with the public to be held at 4 pm in Sala Sinopoli.
As Giuseppe Tornatore explains: “A curious fate, that of my first film, Il camorrista. To be certain to make it, the producer Goffredo Lombardo at Titanus proposed that we also make a television series version of it. A gamble ahead of its time, for this was 1985, and the series mania was still a long time away, but thanks to Lombardo’s foresight, we had the budget we needed to complete the project. So I shot the film for a traditional release in theatres at the same time as the five one-hour episodes for television. Unfortunately, the film did not have an easy time because of the hot issues it addressed and disappeared from circulation a few weeks after its release in theatres. Discouraged, the distributors never aired the television series, and the five episodes were lost in the warehouse of 35mm materials. Today, forty years later, as the glorious Titanus brand has returned to producing, those five hours have re-emerged from the shadows and Guido Lombardo, along with the new management, asked me to restore and re-edit them. I happily joined the effort, which meant a new 4k scan of the original supports, an innovative colour correction, a prodigious remake of the mono sound converted into 5.1, and a resize from the original 1:33 format to 16:9. The editing has remained intact but with slight cuts to reduce the length of each episode to about fifty-five minutes. To go back to work on a project that I completed when I was little more than a kid was very exciting, because in it I rediscovered the commitment and the enthusiasm that led me to want to become a filmmaker”.
