After decades of rust, fire and nostalgia, Cinecittà, the great factory of Italian cinema, is in an unexpected moment of full performance and is managing expansion plans. The reason is political-economic: the European Union injected 260 million euros for the modernization of the Roman studios and the Government of Italy has arranged tax exemptions of 40% for international filming that takes place anywhere in Italian territory. Chiara Sbarigia, the CEO of the company that manages Cinecittà He declared last weekend, at the Locarno Festival, that the demand is so great that the company will expand its infrastructure and that it will offer preferential conditions to welcome Italian auteur cinema, perhaps as a payment for the Community aid received.
The allure of tax breaks is so great that Rome will have competition at home. The producer Andrea Iervolinoabout to make the leap from Italian to American cinema (he is the main partner of a biopic by Enzo Ferrari directed by Michael man and starring Christian Bale that will premiere in September at the Venice Film Festival) has announced that it will invest 55 million euros in building a new city of cinema in Florence with the idea of opening its doors in autumn 2024.
He Ferrari de Mann is a good example of Italy’s renaissance as a film industry. Director of Heat he shot with Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz, as well as Christian Bale, like in the days when Hollywood stars spent their season working in Europe, where the professionals were highly qualified and the prices were low compared to Hollywood. After Mann, Joe WrightDirector of the darkest momentsettled in Rome to turn into a miniseries M. The son of the century, the trilogy on the life of Mussolini written by Antonio Scuratti. And Roland Emmerich has also chosen the capital of Italy to shoot a series of gladiators, Those about to die, in which Anthony Hopkins will take part.
During years, Cinecittà It seemed destined to close its golden story in slow motion. Founded during the Mussolini dictatorship in an attempt to compete with the influence of the United States and with the competition of the German UFA, Cinecittà found a wonderful ally in the Italian auteur cinema of the 50s, 60s and 70s, who was the ambassador of their industry. Later, when the generation of teachers began to lose their creative momentum, Hollywood stopped relocating its productions and Cinecittà entered a long and agonizing decline. The most painful image of this process occurred after the months of global confinement in 2020, when the studios became the place where the Romans received their coronavirus vaccines.
During the dark years Cinecittà had another problem with fire: last year, in August, part of the facilities burned down because of a stage built in papier-mâché to represent Renaissance Florence in a historical documentary. The 2022 fire was the third in 15 years and revealed one of Cinecittà’s problems:the obsolescence of its facilities. The injection of funds from the European Union has served to alleviate this problem.