The Festival, in collaboration with Mosaic Artist Dusciana Bravura, awards this prize "to directors who have contributed to research and narrative experimentation, delving into new and original paths." Our itinerary, begun years ago in the direction of enhancing the value of Italian genre cinema, has seen the awarding of the Medal for Valor to cult directors such as Liliana Cavani, Manetti Bros and Roberto De Feo.
"The Medal for Valor of the 2022 edition of the Ravenna Nightmare Film Fest goes to Claudio Cupellini, who will accompany La terra dei figli, a key film in this year's Contemporanea section.
A director, screenwriter and writer, after graduating from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in 2003 with a degree in Literature and Philosophy. He shoots numerous shorts, including Chi ci ferma più, produced by Rai Cinema, and his theatrical debut is marked by La donna del Mister, an episode of the choral film 4-4-2, produced by Paolo Virzì for Medusa. In 2010 it was the turn of Una vita Tranquilla, which was released in theaters after participating in the Rome Film Festival, winning the award for best male performance with Toni Servillo. Claudio Cupellini then directed Elio Germano and Astrid Berges-Frisbey in Alaska, a story of love and rage, set between Paris and Milan; the work earned the director five nominations and an award at the Nastri d'Argento and two nominations at the David di Donatello. From 2014 to 2021 Claudio Cupellini directed many of the episodes of Gomorra, one of the best-loved Italian television series of recent years, tackling the dark side of organized crime and bringing to the stage the strong emotional component of a raw and violent humanity. La Terra dei Figli, based on Gipi's graphic novel published in 2016 by Coconino Press, is Cupellini's most recent film, which landed in theaters in 2021, at the height of the Covid pandemic. The director has crafted a surprisingly brave Italian cinecomic that explores, in a raw and at the same time moving way, a post-apocalyptic future not so distant from the reality of everyday life, telling on the big screen a poem in which feelings and drama manage to find the right balance. An exhausted world, now reduced to tatters, totally sterile, is rendered by the director with a strong visual power, everything is rotten and putrid, the gray of the lagoon, the peeling shacks, everything becomes a metaphor for a scenario devoid of vital energy, the result of an environmental disaster and now populated by a dying humanity. The director, in this work, makes use of an outstanding cast: Valeria Golino, Valerio Mastandrea, Paolo Pierobon and the young Leon de La Vallée. Claudio Cupellini tackles the fantasy genre bravely, managing to prove that Italian cinema can be free to experiment in any field, without fear, managing to give the viewer a new, unusual language, building an exciting and original filmic grammar.
Claudio Cupellini is the Medal of Valor of the 2022 edition of the Ravenna Nightmare Film Festival, for this propulsive force driven to want to plumb unexplored territories, the strength of a cinema without limits, a voice out of the chorus that marks a turning point in the Italian film scene."
Mariangela Sansone
