The organisers of the Venice film festival unveiled the latest lineup of entries last week as the Italian movie business prepared to host its annual jamboree.
The host nation will enter the competition from a position of strength, as winners of this year's Oscar for best foreign-language film. Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza) not only captivated the judges in Hollywood, but enchanted (and, in some cases no doubt, perplexed) art-house moviegoers the world over. It has already taken almost $2.9m (£1.7m) at the US box office. By comparison, the latest offering from the better-known Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, I'm So Excited! (Los Amantes Pasajeros), released five months earlier, has yet to gross even half that amount.
"Italian cinema in Italy is doing fine," wrote the critic Gabriele Niola in the Italian version of Wired. Whereas in Spain, Germany and the UK the proportion of domestically produced movies varies between 10% and 20%, in Italy last year it was 31%.
Figures released by Italy's society of authors and editors show that the film industry's total earnings rose by 5.6%. In any year, that would be encouraging, but for the Italy of 2013 it was astonishing, since the country was immersed – and remains immersed – in its longest recession since unification more than 150 years ago. Alberto Barbera, artistic director of the Venice festival, said that he and his staff had sifted through 177 Italian feature films submitted for entry this year, "an enormous, daunting number that is even a bit inexplicable".
No field of culture resonates with modern Italians more than cinema. The heyday of directors such as Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and of actors like Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, coincided with a golden age of Italian economic growth and prosperity in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The echoes of Fellini's La Dolce Vita in The Great Beauty highlighted the contrast between the Italy of half a century ago and that depicted by Sorrentino: the Rome of Fellini's day may have been decadent, but it was also vibrant, audacious and dynamic. The Rome of today teeters on the edge of financial bankruptcy and – Sorrentino appears to suggest – of moral bankruptcy, too.
A closer look at the movie industry shows the picture to be a lot more uneven than the headline statistics indicate. The rise in the number of films produced is largely attributable to the spread of digital technology, which has enabled growing numbers of young cinema buffs to realise their ideas at much lower cost than in the past. Investment in the film industry last year fell off a cliff. Government statistics put it 27% lower than in 2012. "Italian cinema is like the country – on its knees," said Isabella Ferrari, one of the stars of The Great Beauty, last week. The increase in ticket sales last year was largely down to just one movie. Sole a Catinelle, starring a southern comic, Luca Pasquale Medici (aka "Checco Zalone"), earned €52m (£41m) in Italy – more than any Hollywood blockbuster has ever done. It may not have been to the taste of some critics – La Stampa called Zalone "the champion of trash humour" – but in February Sole a Catinelle won international recognition when it was awarded the top prize at the Monte Carlo film comedy festival.
The film tells the story of a penniless vacuum cleaner salesman who, through sheer good fortune, gets treated to the holiday of a lifetime and a glimpse into the world of the rich. Pietro Valsecchi, the film's producer, said it "also described a bit what has been happening in Italy: the Berlusconi-ite Italy in which people were told that they could all become wealthy".
The buffoonish hero of Sole a Catinelle is also convinced – wrongly – that he can do anything. "He is a product of the last 20 years," said Valsecchi. "The film speaks a language that young people can understand."
The same, though in a quite different sense, cannot be said about perhaps the most unusual and keenly awaited of the three Italian entries for the Venice festival. Francesco Munzi's Anime Nere tells the story of a feud between two families of the Calabrian mafia, the 'Ndrangheta. It was shot entirely in Calabrian dialect and, said Barbera, would be shown in Venice with Italian subtitles.
