The camorrist – Giuseppe Tornatore’s series from 26 October at the Rome Film Festival
24 October 2023
Giuseppe Tornatore’s series will premiere on Thursday 26 October at the 18th edition of the Rome Film Festival.
The five-part series was filmed in 1985, at the same time as the film of the same name produced by Titanus Production and ReteItalia and released in theaters in 1986. The show never aired. “The current reworking, which required a great artistical commitment even in terms of professionals involved, was completed after almost a year of activity and was produced by Titanus Production and RTI – Mediaset and will be distributed by Minerva Pictures” explains President of Titanus Guido Lombardo. The restoration was curated by Tornatore himself: the public can attend the first and fourth episode at 7 pm in Sala Sinopoli.
The following day, the Oscar-winning filmmaker, winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes for Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, will also meet the public at 4 pm in Sala Sinopoli.
Giuseppe Tornatore explains: “Curious fate for my first film, The camorrist. In order to do it, producer Goffredo Lombardo of Titanus proposed to make a serial version for television. A gamble ahead of time, we were in 1985, the fever of seriality was still far away, but thanks to the foresight of Lombardo we had the budget for the realization of the project. So I shot both the traditional film for cinema exploitation and the five one-hour episodes for television. Unfortunately the film did not have an easy life because of the burning themes it dealt with and disappeared from circulation a few weeks after its release
in the halls. Discouraged, the distributors never aired the television series, and the five episodes were lost in the warehouse of materials in 35mm. Today, after about forty years, thanks to the productive resumption of the glorious Titanus brand, those five hours have resurfaced from the shadows and Guido Lombardo, together with the new executives, has asked me to restore and re-edit them. I willingly joined the company, which involved a new 4k scan of the original media, an innovative color correction, a prodigious remake of the mono sound converted into 5.1, and the resize in 16:9 format from the original 1:33. The editing remained intact but with slight lightening to reduce each episode at about fifty-five minutes. Returning to get my hands on a project realized when I was little more than a boy was a real emotion, because I found all the commitment and enthusiasm that had brought me to the craft of cinema”.