Pestifera, Museum of Contemporary Art- Rivoli - June 26th – September 25th - 2020 -
The film program investigates the representation of pandemics through the art of cinema. Reflecting on the meaning of an exhibition that explores the themes of moral and physical contagion, the artist and director Irene Dionisio declares, "The systematic exploitation of the planet has been transformed, through a predicted and predictable zoonosis, into the scourge of the 21st century. Humanity, especially during this journey, after a long and forced captivity, was faced with a banal certainty, that of its own finitude.
Albert Camus would write: when faced with the “absurdity”of one's own existence, how to react in order not to give in to madness? The cinematic representation, as a succession of extreme images of the global collective unconscious, offers us a possible catharsis, epoché and, perhaps, a recovery of a much-needed collective breath ".
Lovers Film Festival - Turin LGBTQI Visions - 32nd, 33nd, 34nd editions -
The first gay cinema festival in Italy, amongst the most important ones at international level, "Lovers" , recounts different and multi-faceted sexual geographies, but it also shows its care and its profound love for cinema and the LGBTQI community itself.
The Festival, founded by Giovanni Minerba and Ottavio Mario Mai and directed by Irene Dionisio for three editions, keeps evolving and offering new, visionary and prophetic narrative viewpoints about the complex contemporary reality, thanks to its three-decades tradition and a particular focus on cinema. Among the many authors it presented over the years with premieres, are Gus Van Sant, Gregg Araki and Ken Russell.
LaComune - Cinematographic Observatory on Contemporaneity
LLACOMUNE is a device, a gym for active citizenship, a pilot project for a film observatory and permanent assembly held on an annual basis. The project is structured around a common theme identified on the basis of its cultural, social and political relevance and topicality, its imaginative reach and the impact it has on people's lives. The project focuses on a projection system introduced by conversations with the respective authors and / or civil talents and accompanied by meetings in public and / or digital places, preceded by in-depth speeches. The project was born from the co-design of the work team - with widespread leadership - composed of the curators Francesca Comisso and Luisa Perlo (a.titolo), Irene Dionisio, director, visual artist, the festival director and film critic Francesco Giai Via, the cultural operator Ambra Troiano, the philosopher and curator of the Milan Triennale Leonardo Caffo, who, with Andrea Polacchi and Luca Bosonetto, belongs to Arci Torino Committee, which is a group with maieutic function that will conduct public and / or digital assemblies according to shared community rules. The project was born in collaboration with the Arci Torino Committee, Ucca, a.titolo, Associazione Cinema Ambrosio and Wild Strawberries - Laboratory for Moving Images.
Proibitissimo is a project by Irene Dionisio curated by Viola Invernizzi, the collaboration with ANMC, Vittorio Sclaverani, with the support of Center d'Art Contemporain Gèneve, Wild Strawberries and Hangar Creatività, Regione Piemonte. It is a collective research and trial on censorship in Italian cinema from the post-war period to '98, through an exhibition, a video installation, an editorial project and this film review.
Written and scripted by Cesare Zavattini, despite being considered by most critics one of the best cinematographic works of De Sica and one of the masterpieces of Neorealism, "Umberto D." was, public level, one of the least understood: in cinemas, it encountered many obstacles: as with the previous "Bicycle Thieves", there were those who complained that reality was shown with dramatic realism.
Irene Dionisio, curator of the Proibitissimo project, said: «Among the films chosen to be shown at the Palazzo Reale Cinema,Umberto D. by De Sica could not be missing. It is the film for which Giulio Andreotti, then undersecretary for entertainment, uttered the famous Expression “dirty clothes are washed at home”»