Caveat: There is a reason I’ve largely avoided the Italian crime thriller/poliziotteschi genre all my life. That’s what Tele-Italia aired on Montréal’s defunct ethnic TV channel, along with La Piovra mafia series and commedia sexy all’italiana (Edwige Fenech, Banfi or […]
Contributors
Mirella Bontempo
“We were all family: witches, tricksters, what the ancients call cycles, balances and harmony.”
This was my third time at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). It was also Piers Handling’s final year as the TIFF director, with Joana Vicente now as its new director – a sign of the times reflected […]
Cazzarola! Anarchy, Romani, Love, Italy: A Novel, Norman Nawrocki, PM Press, 318 pages Disclosure: I always loved gypsy culture. From Tony Gatlif’s films to his soundtracks and sometimes even the works by non-Romani Balkan filmmakers who examine or exploit […]
Popular Southern folk singer and autodidact guitarist, Matteo Salvatore’s pastoral hell themes weren’t observed from a privileged distance. He hailed from a very poor family that begged and stole vegetables in Puglia, where the Latifondisti exploited landless peasants. These […]
In a country where Opera was invented, it is no wonder that love songs seem to be omnipresent and over-represented. On the flipside, amorous passions lead to political ones. The bulk of these protest songs about rebellion do indeed date […]
Indo-Canadian filmmakers have contributed to bringing stories and faces that we don’t see in Canadian Cinema. Srinivas Krishna (Masala, 1991) refuses to be dubbed a Canadian filmmaker. Eisha Marjara (Desperately Seeking Helen, 1998) and transpacific phenomenon Deepa Mehta, who films […]
Confronted with the query --“Are Canadian films sexy … question mark?” - - I was baffled as what angle to take.
The mass shootings in Utoya, Norway seemed to have shocked the average person, who has never noticed the trends and the blunt comments on television made by politicos in which racism camouflages itself as snide commentary. Society has become complacent […]
The anomaly that is Italy– where a media mogul can have total control of the private and public television, print media and have friends filling in the abyss– is something that the rest of the world cannot fathom. What if […]
After years of denouncing Mother Country’s contempt for its emigrants stuck in the 1950s, I am airing the dirty laundry. What makes the immigrants stuck? I do not see peasantry as pejorative, just for some pernicious superstitions passed down […]
Part 1 is contained in Volume 20 No. 1 – ed Only until recently, the fabled term Italophobia emerged and remained in the domain of cultural studies but remained inaccessible to its own people. What were accessible were the snide […]
Part 1 – Given the size of this article it will be published in 2 pieces. Part 1 in Vol 20 No 1 and Part 2 in Vol 20 No 2. Dedicated to: To my maternal great grandfather D. M, […]
