Travel Tip: Pop Culture and Cinema in Italy
Future Film Festival

Future Film Festival kicks off its eleventh edition with the Italian preview of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the latest ambitious work of art directed by David Fincher, nominated for 13 Academy Awards.

Adapted from the Twenties F.S. Fitzgerald’s book, the film tells the story of a man born in his 80s whose age goes on reverse. The movie with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett is able to tell this extremely original story thanks to understated digital technologies.

Since 1999 the Italian event dedicated to animation and special effects has spread in Italy the knowledge of artists such as Hayao Miyazaki, Osamu Tezuka, Satoshi Kon, Bill Plympton, Tsui Hark, Phil Mulloy, Paul Driessen and the new generation of English and Spanish artists or animation companies, now at the top of box office such as Pixar Animation Studios, Aardman Animations, Blue Sky, as well as lesser known Iranian and South American companies.

Future Film Festival 2009 pays tribute to Japanese horror cinema and to its imaginary creatures through the movies of one of the master of macabre, Nobuo Nakagawa (1905 – 1984). Nakagawa is the inspiring director of the Japanese new wave horror, Hideo Nakata (Ring) or Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse). Nakagawa’s movies are not only dreadful or spectacular, they are also great melodramas full of love, death and revenge, with complex characters. Among the movies presented, Ghost Story of Yotsuya (1959) and Nakagawa's vision of hell, Jigoku (1960).

Ub Iwerks (1901 – 1971) is the focus of the second tribute. He is famous above all for the Mickey Mouse character, realized with Walt Disney, but he was also the creator of Flip the Frog, Willy Whopper and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The homage follows all the most important stages of Iwerks’ career, from the golden age at Disney to the years of independence with his Iwerks Studio, to the return to Disney. The tribute explores the last stage of Iwerks’ career, notably as innovator of special effects for important movies with Disney’s productions, The Three Caballeros, Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and Fred McLeod's science fiction cult classic Forbidden Planet and  Hitchcock's The Birds.