30. Film Festival della Lessinia
Bosco Chiesanuova (Italia)
23 August - 1 September 2024

Cainà lives a youth of peasant labor in the rugged mountains of Sardinia, courted in vain by the shepherd Agostineddu, for whom she feels no affection. The girl dreams of a different life. When a ship lands on the coast, she hides in the hold and flees to sea. After a violent storm, she is discovered and seduced by Captain Pietro. But life on the Continent will be just as unbearable. The girl runs away again and, returning to her village, discovers that her father has died, struck by lightning in an attempt to find her and the shepherd has gone mad. Remaining for her is only have one more, definitive, escape. Fortunately found in the Prague Film Library in 1990, the only surviving copy of the film, with blinded titles and captions, was restored on the initiative of the Cineteca Sarda and the Cineteca del Friuli and presented for the first time at the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone in 1991, with a new soundtrack composed by Mauro Palmas. In 2022, one hundred years after its release, the film returned to the screen in Aggius, in the town of Gallura where it was shot, and will be shown at the Film Festival with a soundtrack performed live by Mauro Palmas (liuto cantabile, mandola and mandocello), Alessandro Foresti (piano) and Marco Argiolas (sax and clarinet).

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  Gennaro Righelli

  Of Neapolitan and Bolognese origins, he began his career acting in his father's company and then devoted himself to film starting in 1911, first as an actor and then as a director. After having made Cainà. The island and the continent, in 1922, he moved to Berlin where he directed some fifteen films from 1923 to 1929. Back in Italy, in 1930 he made the first Italian film with sound: La canzone dell’amore.