Selfie – April 23rd
7:30 on Wednesday, April 23rd
Room 137, Isenberg School of Management
UMass Amherst
Selfie
(2019, Agostino Ferrente, Italy, 76 min, in Italian w/ English subtitles)
Alessandro works the counter at a café and Pietro hopes to become a barber. These two sixteen-year-olds, following the direction of filmmaker Agostino Ferrente, film themselves with an iPhone: they tell the story of their everyday life, their tough Neapolitan neighborhood, and the friendship that unites them. They also recount the tragic story of Davide, their friend and neighbor, who, in 2014, was killed by a cop after being misidentified as a wanted fugitive. Having read about this incident, Ferrente sought the boys out and loaned them a cellphone, so that they could describe for us, from inside, the context that gives rise to such tragedies.
Film Screening
Wednesday, April 23rd
Free and open to the public
Introduced by Anna Botta (Professor Emerita of Italian Studies and of World Literatures)
Co-Sponsored by:
Q&A Following Screening with
Agostino Ferrente
Director of Selfie
Agostino Ferrente is a director, producer, and artistic director. His 1999 film, Intervista a mia madre (Interview with My Mother), co-directed with Giovanni Piperno and produced for RAI TV, was a hit both on the festival circuit and on national television. In 2001, he founded the Apollo 11 collective, with the goal of restoring a celebrated art-house cinema in Rome. In 2006, his film, The Orchestra of Piazza Vittorio, won more prizes than any other Italian documentary. In 2012, again with Piperno, Ferrente directed Le cose belle (Beautiful Things), a documentary that returned to the young Neapolitan protagonists of Intervista a mia madre and continued their stories—again winning more awards than any other Italian documentary. In 2019, Ferrente directed Selfie: it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, was nominated for the Best European Documentary at the European Film Award, and won the David di Donatello Prize and the Nastro d’Argento Prize for Best Italian Documentary. He is currently working on a sequel to Selfie, tentatively titled B Side.
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Anna Botta
Professor Emerita of Italian Studies and of World Literatures at Smith College
Anna Botta’s academic training began at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and continued at the University of Turin, Italy (laurea in Lingue Straniere Moderne). She subsequently studied in France, England and the Netherlands before moving to the United States, where she received a master and a doctorate in comparative literature and literary theory from the University of Pennsylvania. At Smith, she shuttles between the Department of Italian Studies and the Comparative Literature Program, with forays into Film and Media Studies.
Her current book project, tentatively titled Solid Mediterraneans, builds on previously published articles and the special issue “Mediterraneans” that she co-edited for the Massachusetts Review in 2014. She has edited two volumes of essays: Italo Calvino newyorkese (Avagliano, 2002) and Scrittrici eccentriche (Tre lune, 2003). She has published articles on Italo Calvino, Cristina Campo, Gianni Celati, Antonio Tabucchi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Renato Poggioli, Georges Didi-Huberman, Julia Kristeva, Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano and Predrag Matvejević in journals such as Modern Language Notes, Italian Culture, California Italian Studies Journal, Contemporary Literature and Spunti e parole, as well as in various volumes of critical essays. Her most recent articles in visual studies include a study of Luigi Ghirri’s photography and a cinematic analysis of Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli. She has also served as member of the MLA Forum on the Mediterranean (2013-2018).
Trailer