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| THE PIRATE WHO
WANTED PEACE
singing behind screens
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ERMANNO OLMI WAS MAKING HIS PIRATE MOVIE AROUND THE SAME TIME JERRY BRUCKHEIMER WAS PRODUCING PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN.
BUT SINGING BEHIND SCREENS COULD
HARDLY BE MORE DIFFERENT.
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At the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, Italian director Ermanno Olmi - who would turn 70 later that year - unveiled his new film, The Profession of Arms (Il mestiere delle armi), a sumptuous costume drama set in the 16th century whose theme (among others) was the fundamental changes in warfare brought about by the advent of firearms.
What seemed to many of the critics who saw it at Cannes to be an austerely beautiful but ‘difficult’ film featuring largely unknown actors (it was shot in Bulgaria, with Sandra Ceccarelli the only name likely to be familiar to Italian cinemagoers) turned out to be one of the surprise hits of the year in Italy.
It also seemed to mark a new departure for the veteran director, whose early films like The Job (Il posto, 1961) appeared to herald a revival of the great days of Italian neo-realism, but who had, in the intervening three decades, constantly renewed his film-making style. The Profession of Arms, however, was the first time he had done anything on quite so epic a scale.
The success of that film opened up new horizons for Olmi, who began to develop an even more ambitious tale: Singing Behind Screens, the story of an early 19th-century female pirate captain on the South China Sea.
As with Profession, Olmi wrote the script himself, and brought along with him many of the collaborators from the earlier film: the executive producer Alessandro Calosci; the appropriately named costume designer Francesca Sartori; production designer Luigi Marchione; and above all his son, Fabio, whose work on Profession had been, quite simply, stunning.
The project also attracted the attention of leading US independent Lakeshore International, who were both excited about the possibility of working with a European director of Olmi’s stature, and aware of just how much production value the film-maker would get on screen for a budget that would be regarded as small by US standards.
They weren’t wrong, as the pictures on this and the following pages show.
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