Saturday 18 October

Hall

11:00

The ninth edition of the Colazioni letterarie festival promoted in collaboration with the Società Dante Alighieri Lugano kicks off with one of the greatest authors of modern literature-Anton Čechov, who also opens the 2025/26 theater season directed by Carmelo Rifici.

Re-readings of Anton Čechov's Three Sisters and The Seagull will be the focus of the meeting with Giancarlo Zappoli and Claudia Bersani, who will lead the audience on a journey between literature and cinema. After an introduction on the genesis of the two works, the speakers will comment on excerpts from Marco Bellocchio's The Seagull (1977) and Margarethe von Trotta and Dacia Maraini's Fear and Love (1988).

The two films, although very different in style, offer original perspectives on Chekhovian texts: Bellocchio chooses a faithful but non-theatrical reading, enriched by the use of exteriors and an intense rendering of the relationships between the characters; Von Trotta, on the other hand, sets the story in 1980s Pavia, focusing on the private dimension of the three sisters and their relationship with a society from which they are trying to emancipate themselves.

This is an opportunity to explore, through the voices of Zappoli and Bersani, the dialogue between theater and cinema and the extraordinary topicality of Chekhovian poetics, also staged at the beginning of October on the LAC stage with the Diptych of the Storm.

Giancarlo Zappoli is a lecturer and film critic. He is director of MYmovies and artistic director of Castellinaria. Bellinzona young film festival. He has written Invitation to the Cinema of Woody Allen (Mursia), Éric Romher (Castoro Cinema), Ciak si spia. Cinema and Intelligence (New Argos) and edited for the Center for Film Studies numerous other books including A Panther at Tiffany's. The Cinema of Blake Edwards (Il Castoro Cinema) and Born to Seduce. The Cinema of Claude Lelouch (Lindau).

Claudia Bersani is co-director of Cinecultura - Cinema for Schools (Solothurn), an association that promotes film culture among young people. She is also involved in cultural mediation as part of Castellinaria - Bellinzona Young Film Festival. She collaborates with the magazine "Il Ragazzo Selvaggio" and edited with Giancarlo Zappoli a monograph on Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha in literature and cinema.