V I D E O • A G E JU N E 2 0 12 22 festivals the Italian Triangle, which is similar to the Bermuda Triangle: once inside, it’s difficult to escape. Indeed, it looks like Italians have decided that the month of September belongs to their multimedia industry, and are determined to keep visiting international media executives captive, at least up until the beginning of MIPCOM in Cannes on October 6. Ignoring, for now, the drama associated with the Venice Film Festival’s (VFF) competition with the Roma Cinema Fest (to be held November 9-17 just after the AFM and with its new artistic director Marco Muller, formerly with VFF), let’s preview Prix Italia, which is sponsored by RAI, Italy’s state broadcasting organization. The Prix’s venues will be the same as its past three editions in Turin: the RAI Production Center will host all the meetings in its Radio and Television Museum wing, while the juries will work in the nearby Radio Building. On the television side there will be three juries, one each for documentaries, performing art and drama. This latter group will be made up of 14 members from 13 countries, including experts from Brazil, Canada and Russia. Prix Italia’s Secretary General, Giovanna Milella, pointed out that Turin was Italy’s first capital and the city where RAI was originally founded. Today it still houses one of Italy’s most important production centers, plus the RAI Research Center and the RAI National Symphony Orchestra. Turin, hometown of automaker FIAT, has been the venue of many past Prix Italia events, starting in 1950, then again in 1972 and 1994. The Prix has been held in this city continuously since 2009 and will possibly remain until 2013. At the Gala Concert of the opening ceremony, the RAI Orchestra, conducted by 36-year-old Slovakian maestro Jurai Valcuha, will perform at Turin’s Arturo Toscanini Auditorium and broadcast live on RAI-TV5, Radio-3 and worldwide via RAI-TV International. At the organizational level, the big news is that starting with this event, Prix Italia has been placed under the RAI World umbrella, a division of RAI that is responsible for all internationalrelated activities, including channel distribution and marketing and, eventually, program sales in the fashion of BBC Worldwide. (For more on Prix’s schedule of events, turn to the following page). And speaking of the BBC, the last event on the September calendar, the Roma Fiction Fest (RFF), will see the venerable British broadcast organization featured during a BBC Day at the Auditorium Parco della Musica, the event headquarters, which is not centrally located. Renata Polverini, the governor of the Regione Lazio — the region of Rome and one of the key sponsors of the RFF — made this announcement last April at MIP-TV during a press conference with BBC Worldwide’s Tim Mutimer and RFF artistic director Steve Della Casa. Other sponsors of RFF are Italy’s Association of TV Producers and Rome’s Chamber of Commerce. (Continued from Cover) Focus on Italy APT and BBC officials during a RFF press conference at MIP Turin will once again host Prix Italia The Venice Film Festival’s red carpet The Roma Fiction Fest’s headquarters, the Auditorium Parco della Musica, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano “ Indeed, it looks like Italians have decided that the month of September belongs to their multimedia industry.
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