“What Am I Doing Here?” Film Festivals, Awards Shows, and Stars During the COVID-19 Emergency

Cristina Formenti; Francesco Pitassio; Sara Sampietro

doi:10.6092/issn.2280-9481/14491

Authors

Cristina Formenti University of Udine

Cristina Formenti is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at University of Udine, where she is conducting a project entitled For an Environmentally Sustainable Documentary: Production, Distribution, Representation. She is author of Il mockumentary: la fiction si maschera da documentario (Mimesis 2013) and The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution (Bloomsbury 2022) as well as editor of Mariangela Melato tra cinema, teatro e televisione (Mimesis 2016) and Valentina Cortese: una diva intermediale (Mimesis 2018). She is co-editor of the journal Animation Studies and serves on the board of the Society for Animation Studies.
Francesco Pitassio University of Udine

Francesco Pitassio is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Udine. Among his books are Ombre silenziose.(2002), Attore/Divo (2003), Neorealist Film Culture, 1945-1954 (2019), and Popular Cinemas in East Central Europe (2017), which he edited with Dorota Ostrowska and Zsuzsanna Varga. He is the Italian Principal Investigator of the EU HERA funded project VICTOR-E. Visual Culture of Trauma, Obliteration and Reconstruction in Post-WW II Europe and of the national funded project F-ACTOR. Forms of Contemporary Media Professional Acting (2000-2020). His research interests focus on film acting and stardom, Italian film history and culture, documentary cinema, Central-Eastern European cinema.
Sara Sampietro Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

Sara Sampietro is Research Fellow at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and coordinator of the project Opinion Leader 4 Future. Sara Sampietro is Research Fellow at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and coordinator of the project Opinion Leader 4 Future. Since 2018, she has been teaching Language and Expressive Forms of the Performing Arts, for the Degree on Media Studies, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy (Università Cattolica). In parallel to her academic activity, she worked for more than 10 years in RCS Media Group, holding managerial roles in market research and digital marketing.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2280-9481/14491

Keywords:

Covid-19, Film Festivals, Film Awards, Italian Stardom

Abstract

Weaving together celebrity studies and film festival studies, the essay underscores how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the stars’ presence, mode of appearance, and employment within the rituals of film festivals and awards ceremonies. It also touches upon the way COVID-19 has impacted the relationship between film stars and their public within such events and how this relationship has been rethought also through the exploitation of Internet technologies. To this end, the essay benefits from interviews conducted with the artistic directors of the main Italian film festivals and awards ceremonies as well as with film stars that have attended such events under these unprecedented circumstances. More precisely, after providing a general outline of the changes that occurred within Italian film festivals and awards ceremonies during 2020 and how they have impacted the self-promotion of film stars, the essay focuses on two key events of the Italian awards and festival season: the David di Donatello awards ceremony and the Venice Film Festival.

“What Am I Doing Here?” Film Festivals, Awards Shows, and Stars During the COVID-19 Emergency

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