Pordenone Silent Film Festival

[denis v]

Hi to all,

I'm a member of kinejapan list since last year, app., but as this is my
first  time  to be an "active" member let me shortly introduce myself.
I'm Denis Valic from Ljubljana, working at Slovenian cinematheque as a
head of publishing dept.
Since   I'm   quite   regular  guest at Le giornate del Cinema Muto, I
got   a   felling   that  somebody  might get a wrong impression about
it. So I would like just to ad some info.
>From it's beginning to 1999 the festival took place in Pordenone. They
move  it  to Sacile because the last mayor of Pordenone closed the
city  theatre  for  reconstruction  (but  the  work on it still didn't
start).   It   was   quite  hard  to find a proper (lodging problem is
quite big in that area) theater in the area: the
first  idea was Udine (the same place as Far East Film Festival have),
but  it  was  droped  because  the  politicians  from  the province of
Pordenone  (the  festival  is  receiving  the larger financial support
right  from  them)  didn't  like  the  idea  of  moving  it to another
province.  So the only solution in the same province was Sacile. It is
true  that  in  the  city  (very small) they have just few hotels, but
there  are  quite  a lot of them (nice small familly hotels and privat
accomodations)  in  cities  and villages around Sacile. If you will go
with a car (or rent it) it is really not a problem. And for us without
a  car  the festival is offering a regular bus service from nearly all the
locations that guests are staying to Sacile.
Regarding  the  screenings: they have a common festival schedule - the
morning  session till around 13, 1-1.30 hours for lunch break followed
by  afternoon  session, again a small break for dinner and finally the
evening  session  that  is going on till 1.am. Since you are following
just silent films (but always with at least piano accompaniment) sometimes
it  could  be  hard  to stay awake (particularly after a meal). Usually
this problem is dissapearing after few days (if you are drinking a lot
of coffee, specially italian one, you don't have it at all).
To conclude, it  is  true  that  when the festival took place in Pordenone there
were  less  problems with proper (big enough)theatre and with lodging.
But  still the festival is remaining the most important event in Europe
(I don't know how it is in the rest of the world) what concerns silent
films.

Denis Valic