The four talks will be given on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Cecilia Sala will kick off the last night of the festival.

When Martin Scorsese is done with the shooting and the production of a film, he calls her to make sure the Italian dubbing is as accurate as possible with reference to the source language. But the person who chose the cast for Game of Thrones – a series which set many records – will come, too. Then the most famous among the brilliant friends will be there, as well as the 28-year-old woman who shot and talked about a significant number of today’s war settings. They’re four guests of four different generations, but with a running-through common thread: love for cinema. Elettra Caporello, Ruth Earley, Margherita Mazzucco and Cecilia Sala are the guests of the ninth edition of Ennesimo Film Festival, a short-film screening series which will be hosted by Astoria Theatre in Fiorano Modenese from April 28th to May 5th. 

On Friday morning, May 3rd, Ruth Earley – casting director of Game of Thrones – will meet the students attending class 1B of “Istituto Leopardi” (Fiorano), winners of the project “Incipit, at the origin of Grinta”. On the first days of the festival they will work closely with film director Nils Vanderwaeren, who won the Fuorifuoco category last year. Earley, who will stay in Fiorano until the end of the festival, will mark the end of the project that involved hundreds of middle-school students. There are different steps. First of all, three different two-hour meetings – set up during school time – have been planned to get to know how ideas related to cinema are developed and to understand the role of authors in deciding how to recount their narration. After this first step, students were asked to imagine and write down the script for the beginning of the short film Grinta. Students attending class 1B of Leopardi middle school (Fiorano) gave the best interpretation, so they have been working on the pre-production phase for the last months, together with the director and the Ennesimo Academy educators. Then, from April 28th to April 30th, they will enter the scene to concretely produce their ideas. The set will be once again the city of Fiorano, and the final product will finally be shown on the last day of festival (May 5th) at Astoria Theatre, after being edited by Vanderwaeren and the students. In this regard, researching and selecting the actors of a movie is one of the most important duties of a film production. It’s not only about choosing an actor for a role, but also about competences such as evaluating performers’ abilities and their value from a business point of view. That’s why working with Earley will be very important for the students and their personal growth. 

The brilliant friend Margherita Mazzucco will kick off the Official Selection night, which will take place at 9pm on Friday, May 3rd, at Astoria Theatre. Mazzucco (22) became famous for her performance as the main character of the Italian-American tv series “The brilliant friend”. In addition, two years ago she was at the Venice Film Festival with “Chiara”, a film in which she was the main character. And by the way, “The brilliant friend” – in which Mazzucco is a main character – debuted in 2018 on the Italian television with an average of more than seven million viewers and 29% of share. These numbers have then been confirmed in the following episodes and seasons. Mazzucco will be the special guest of the Dj set which will take place at the end of the evening – from 11:30pm –at Astoria Theatre’s Cafè.

Saturday evening, May 4th, at 9pm will be Elettra Caporello’s turn. She has been the dialogist of many works by Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. Caporello will kick off the Official Selection showing. First Italian female dialogist, she worked on more than 1,600 English movies. She wrote all the Italian dialogues in Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese’s films and she was given a lot of recognition during her career. What does a dialogist do? Basically, a dialogist is in charge of the linguistic and cultural transposition of the content of the script, as well as of the adaptation of dialogues in terms of actors’ labial and expressive synchronization. It’s certainly not an easy job.

Cecilia Sala, young successful reporter, will close the festival on Sunday, May 5th, when all the awards will be assigned. Journalist and podcaster, she uses written and spoken words to talk about the world. She tells Stories – this is the title of her podcast for Chora Media – which help us understand cultural and social dynamics, from war zones to border areas. In 2021, she was a witness of the fall of Kabul in Afghanistan. She also went to Ukraine to give voice to people who live with bombings, and to Teheran to observe the movements after Mahsa Amini’s death. Her latest book, “L’incendio” (“The fire”), is a choral story about these three fires burning the world. Recently, Cecilia Sala went to the border with Gaza, where she collected testimonies after 7th October 2023 – a terrible day for humanity. She writes for Il Foglio, she collaborated with Vanity Fair, L’Espresso, Rai and Will Media. She worked in the editorial staff of Otto e mezzo on channel LA7, too.