After finding much favor with The Academy when it came to craft categories for his previous feature Pinocchio, Italian director Matteo Garrone has now earned his first Best International Feature Film nomination this year for his acclaimed migrant drama Io Capitano. In celebration, NYC’s Quad Cinema will hold a retrospective titled “The Great Garrone,” taking place February 16-22, leading up to Cohen Media Group’s February 23 release of his latest film.
“A real son of Rome (and a favorite at Cannes, Berlin, and Venice), director and screenwriter Matteo Garrone carries the mantle of Italy’s neo realist and surrealist-fantasist traditions of cinema and lifts them into the 21st Century,” notes Quad Cinema. “His accolade-laden filmography toes the lines of narrative, documentary, and fantasy exquisitely, bringing forth to the surface the depth of humanism and understanding through resonant human stories and an artist’s eye for fine detail. The Quad is thrilled to present this retrospective of Matteo Garrone, leading up to the theatrical release of his new, Academy Award-nominated film Io Capitano, opening on February 23.”
Ed Frankl said in his review of Io Capitano, “Matteo Garrone’s talent for weaving stories out of the fabric of real events––especially those involving desperate or violent people––gets another airing in Io Capitano, an engrossing, visceral portrait of one young man’s brutal journey from Senegal to the coast of Italy. The director won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2008 for Gomorrah, his defining, excoriating portrait of the Camorra crime syndicate, and he performed the trick again ten years later in Dogman, inspired by a gruesome gangland murder in Rome. He’s also had success in comedies (Reality) and fantasy (Tale of Tales), but his new film is an epic embracing the defining issue of Italian politics right now––the flow of refugees crossing the Mediterranean heading for Europe––making a potentially abstract, no-less-urgent topic tactile and approachable.”
Check out the retrospective lineup below.
The Embalmer (Matteo Garrone, 2002)
Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, 2008) – Winner, Grand Prix (Matteo Garrone) – 2008 Cannes Film Festival
Reality (Matteo Garrone, 2012) – Winner, Grand Prix (Matteo Garrone) – 2008 Cannes Film Festival
Tale of Tales (Matteo Garrone, 2015)
Dogman (Matteo Garrone, 2018)
Pinocchio (Matteo Garrone, 2021)
Io Capitano (Matteo Garrone, 2023) – opening February 23, only in theaters