Claudio Caligari

Retrospective of Claudio Caligari
Amore tossico, Italy, 1983, 96’
L’odore della notte, Italy, 1998, 101’
Non essere cattivo, Italy, 2015, 100’
In memorial of the talent of Claudio Caligari, a great director of Italian cinema who has been working mainly in independent sectors connected with social investigation and documentation, RIFF hosts a retrospective dedicated to him after he passed away last year.
The festival hosts only his three narrative feature films, with their documentary attrinutes, that has always characterized his work, in a very realistic representation of the society. This tendency in the description of reality pushes Caligari towards the heavy cinema, which narrates dramatic stories with pain going out of the screen to touch the viewers, constituting a par of the aggressiveness of the 80s and 90s.
Amore tossico participated in international festivals, including the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Premio De Sica in a special section while belonging to the classic cult of underground filmography.
L’odore della notte, fifteen years after his first masterpiece, inspired by the true story of the Band of Clockwork Orange with a voice of Italian “Poliziottesco” cinema (Italian crime cinema)  presents  the author’s social ambitions.
His last film, Non essere cattivo, an updated revival of his debut film, a continuous self-quotation, a way of playing with the cinema to present genuine hidden dramas of an era and society.
There is a short retrospective to honor the talent of this great master, perhaps recognized too late; as it often happens with “auteur cinema” that presents the must-say stories, sometimes with a broken voice, sometimes with a shout, without following any known model, but building step by step one own’s way.