"The Camorrist"
Series Mania Festival is the perfect scenario to exhibit the never seen before TV series "The Camorrist" made by Oscar winner Giuseppe Tornatore. Episodes 1 and 4 will be presented on March 19 by the producer Guido Lombardo, president of Titanus Productions.
The series will be aired by Mediaset in Italy and has been acquired by AMC for Spain (Sundance TV) and Portugal. "The Camorrist" has been sold to Slovakia, CIS and Baltics. The five-part series was filmed in 1985, concurrently with the production of the homonymous film, which was produced by Titanus Production and ReteItalia and released in theatres in 1986. The series never aired.
"The current reworking, which required great artistic and professional commitment, has been completed after almost a year of activity and was produced by Titanus Production and RTI - Mediaset and is distributed by Minerva Pictures," explains Titanus President Guido Lombardo.
Giuseppe Tornatore explains: "A curious fate, the one of my first film, 'The Camorrist'. In order to secure the production, the producer Goffredo Lombardo of Titanus suggested me to also create a serialized version for television. It was a gamble ahead of its time, we were in 1985, the seriality fever was still far off, but thanks to Lombardo's foresight, we had the budget necessary for the project. So, I simultaneously shot both the film intended for traditional cinematic exploitation and the five one-hour episodes for television. Unfortunately, the film didn't have an easy life due to the controversial themes it dealt with and disappeared from circulation a few weeks after its release in theatres. Discouraged, the distributors never aired the television series, and the five episodes were lost in the 35mm materials warehouses. Today, after about forty years, thanks to the revival of the glorious Titanus brand, those five hours have emerged from the shadows and Guido Lombardo, together with the new executives, asked me to restore and re-edit them. I gladly accepted the challenge, which involved a new 4k scanning of the original materials, innovative colour correction, a prodigious remaking of the mono sound converted to 5.1, and resizing to 16:9 format from the original 1:33. The editing remained intact but with slight adjustments to reduce the duration of each episode to about fifty-five minutes. Returning to work on a project I made when I was a young man was a real thrill because I found all the commitment and enthusiasm that had originally drawn me to the cinema profession."