The 16th edition of the MittelCinemaFest, the Central European Italian Cinema Festival, kicked off in several cities with a varied selection of the best films released in Italy in 2018. Thanks to the cooperation between the Italian Cultural Institute in Budapest and the Istituto Luce Cinecittà, which has long been committed to promoting Italian Cinema around the world, the films screened in Hungarian cinemas will narrate stories full of emotions, laughter and food for thought. In this edition too, an essential element of success will be the cooperation with the Budapest Film and with Puskin and Tabàn cinema theatres in Budapest, the locations where the festival moved its first steps way back in 2003.
Over the years, the MittelCinemaFest has increasingly become an awaited popular event in which the attention for Italian cinema seems to be renewed every year, increasing the number of Hungarian distributors that buy Italian films. This year the Festival will screen the films purchased by Mozinet, Cinenuovo, Cirko Film and ADS Service, which proves that one of this Festival’s main aims – namely to advertise more Italian films among the Hungarian public – is slowly showing results. In this respect, it should be noted that this year, in addition to Budapest, some of the films will be screened in Szeged, at the Belvárosi Mozi cinema theatre and, for the first time, at the Apollo cinema in Debrecen.
The 16th edition of the MittelCinemaFest is rich of impacting stories spanning across a wide variety of genres and themes, narrating the numerous aspects of living in Italy today and, above all, stories told with ingenuity and originality. Italian cinema continues to offer emotions and this selection of films not only shows the innate wish to tell one’s own and other people’s stories but also the capacity that film-making has of following the trends of modern-day society, look into the folds of humankind and, with honesty and empathy, narrate stories that, in some way, are also ours.
