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Lucania Film Festival, the first international cinema festival in Basilicata, is a project of education, production and distribution of the cinematic art. It is a permanent laboratory of Short film and Visual Arts whose aim is the increasing of the value of the territory as location container for the production of audio-visual works and as place of comparison between films makers from Lucania and the international ones. The Lucania Film Festival likes contaminating the small community, in which it was born with new technologies and new communicative models. The Festival is organized and promoted by Allelammie Cultural Association with the artistic direction of Namavista.

War Video section/Raffaele Ciriello
The Lucania Film Festival dedicates the section War Video (war cinema journalism) to Raffaele Ciriello, a fotoreporter from Lucania who died in 2002. Raffaele was a freelance photographer specialized in actuality reportages. He started with the sporting photography, following the 1991 and 1992 editions of the Paris - Dakar. Among the sands of the Sahara he turned his passion into an authentic job. And there he discovered Africa, its overwhelming vitality and its tragedies.

In 1993 his first great occasion to approach the actuality fotoreportage: Raffaele is in the Somalia devastated by the drought and the civil war, with the Italian soldiers of the mission "Restore Hope". In Somalia he receives his fire baptism. And it’s there that, like companion of the last trip, he withdraws the Rai envoys Ilaria Alpi and Miran Hrovatin just before the barbarous killing. He assists there to the hell of the check - point Pasta. Postcards from Hell – Cartoline dall' Inferno – the name of the internet site which collects his work - are the images that he’s going to take from this moment and for the nine following years, places where people fight and die, with a special consideration of the people who suffer the conflicts: in Rwanda, in Sierra Leone, in ex-Yugoslavia, in Albania, in Kosovo, in Eritrea, in Iran, in Cecenia, in Afghanistan. His reportages from the hottest zones of the world find place in the greatest newspapers of the world, from the Corriere della Sera to the New York Times.

Afghanistan was his favourite "hell". The rebellious Afghanistan of the mujaheddins and of the Commander Massoud, the hero of the resistance against the Russian. The legendary Lion of the Panshir is the protagonist of an incisive documentary made by Raffaele and transmitted by the Rai in 2001. He often goes, also with Maria Grazia Cutuli, the Corriere della Sera envoy who was killed in Afghanistan in November 2001, his trip companion from Africa to Balkans to Rwanda. There he goes after the collapse of the twin Towers, covering for the Corriere della Sera the north side of the advance towards Kabul. In February 2002 he decides to come back in Palestine, where he had already been in 1994. He feels as a professional gap the fact of not having been there after the beginning of the Second Intifada. He wants to take other pictures in Gaza, Hebron, Ramallah, for updating his internet site. He also brings a small digital camera, his last passion. And with that camera Raffaele Ciriello, 42 years old, films in Ramallah his last reportage, his live death.

Today that shot is opening the site created by him, a moving tribute to his dedication of professional of the image fallen on field.


For further information visit the official site of the project:
http://www.lucaniafilmfestival.it