It is our great pleasure to present the Ninth Edition of the Italian Film Festival | Cinema Italiano Festival NZ. Compiling our curation of Italian films is a formidable and pleasurable task. Nothing we read or watch is ever truly impartial, so I have endeavoured to make my film selection reflect my personal understanding of great cinema. Balancing genres, styles and film availabilities, this is one of the strongest line-ups in the nine years since starting the festival. Films such as The Eight Mountains, There’s Still Tomorrow, Kidnapped, La Chimera or Caro Diario are masterful and diverse films that keep Italian Cinema at the summit of the art form. Watching this year’s films, I sensed a thematic ‘palimpsest’, where the past, present and future operate simultaneously. In films like Nanni Moretti’s Aprile, we see the comic emergence of populism - the unfortunate movement that influences the world today. In Marco Bellocchio’s Kidnapped, the dangers of blind dogma are chronicled. At the same time, many of our films play with concepts of ‘future’, like the gently apocalyptic The Order of Time or Nanni Moretti’s self-deprecating A Brighter Tomorrow. In Director Paolo Genovese’s The First Day of My Life, we are asked what we might do differently if we could do it all again. Yet this gaze toward what is to come is rooted in Italy’s enormous cultural patrimony and I am reminded of the power, necessity and enduring nature of art. In commemoration of the 80th Anniversary of the Battle of Monte Cassino, a moment in history where New Zealand and Italy were unfortunate protagonists, I have included my short film, Maunga Cassino. The first film is entirely in Te Reo Māori and Italian languages. I do hope to see you in person. Un caro saluto