Maurizio Scaparro will present his latest film with Azcona in Seville

The last Pucinella It will be screened in a special session paying tribute to the brilliant deceased screenwriter and the director of the Venice Theater Biennale.

Seville European Film Festival will make a special presentation of the latest work produced in Italy by the recently deceased Spanish screenwriter, Rafael Azcona, directed by one of the most prestigious European film, theater and television directors, the Italian Maurizio Scaparro, current head of the Venice Theater Biennale, who will attend the premiere.

The collaboration between Scaparro and Azcona began when the Italian director was appointed advisor for theatrical activities at the Universal Exposition of Seville 92. The result was the theatrical and audiovisual production of a version of Don Quixote, starring Josep María Flotats, which served to open the cultural programming of Expo 92 at the Lope de Vega theater.

The artistic collaboration led to a great friendship between the two creators that has remained until the end. “It is a great satisfaction to be able to present this film in Spain, especially as a tribute to Rafael,” commented Scaparro during his meeting with the director of the Seville Festival, Javier Martín-Domínguez, during the Venice Film Festival. Furthermore, he stated that he was excited to return to Seville, his adopted city, where “I was very happy working and where I made many friends.”

Azona, the great teacher

Rafael Azcona is one of the great screenwriters of Spanish cinema. In 1959, he began his fruitful career as several of his scripts were made into films by the director, also Italian, Marco Ferreri, among them, A modern story, Sand the business ended, o The professor although the most successful ones produced in Spain, as a result of this collaboration, were The stroller y The flat. In 1961, Luis García Berlanga directed Azcona's first original script, Placid. He also worked with Carlos Saura (The First Angelica o Oh, Carmela!), Luis García Berlanga (The executioner o The heifer), Fernando Trueba (The year of lights, Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival, or Good times, Hollywood Oscar for best foreign film), and José Luis García Sánchez (La corte de faraón y Tranvía a la Malvarrosa). Es autor de varios libros, entre los que se encuentra El Estrafalario o Vida del repelente niño Vicente, sobre las aventuras de este personaje que inventó en su época de La Codorniz.

Rafael Azcona ganó el Premio Nacional de Cinematografía en 1982, la Medalla de Oro de las Bellas Artes en 1994 y el Goya de honor en 1998. Por sus guiones, Azcona ha ganado cinco premios Goya: The animated forest (1988), ¡Ay, Carmela! (1991), Belle Époque (1993), Tirano Banderas (1994) y The language of butterflies (2000). Azcona además fue un amante de las nuevas tecnologías.

L’ultimo Pulcinella, freely inspired by an unpublished text by Roberto Rossellini, tells the story of a relationship, sometimes traumatic, between a young Neapolitan in search of new creative stimuli and a life far from his city, and his father, a street artist, who earns a toilsome living singing and performing “the stories of Pulcinella” in the squares of Naples. Likewise, it is the story of a world that changes, of generations that barely understand each other, set between today's Naples and suburban Paris, a crossroads of difficult and often violent contradictions, where father and son will strive to build new dreams also through theater. But disappointment will be stronger than hope.

Maurizio Scaparro, a 'monstrous' of the stage

Among his shows, La Venexiana stands out, an anonymous comedy from the Renaissance (he made three adaptations, the last in 2000 in Paris, a version in French with Claudia Cardinale as the protagonist); an innovative version of Hamlet the Shakespeare (1972); Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand (1977); The Long Night of Medea by Corrado Alvaro, at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, with the extraordinary performance of Irene Papas (1976). In the 80s, Scaparro created the Venice Theater Carnival where shows and performances enliven, for the first time, day and night, the theaters and streets of the city, which achieved great global impact (1980-81-82) and with the creation of a large multimedia project (theater-cinema-television) of the Don Quixote by Cervantes with the adaptation by Rafael Azcona and Tullio Kezich. The theatrical show was premiered in 1983 in Italy and later toured Europe.

In the 90s, Scaparro adapted Memoirs of Hadrian the novel by Marguerite Yourcenar. This show was on the billboards in Italian and European theaters until 2007. In 2000, Scaparro brought two of his theatrical shows to the cinema American by Franz Kafka and Remember. Currently, he is working on the show Baghdad dust with Máximo Ranieri inspired by One Thousand and One Nights and with the collaboration of an Italian journalist, special envoy to the Iraq war.

Scaparro has been artistic director of the Venice Theater Biennale from 1979 to 1982; In 1983 Jack Lang, French Minister of Culture, appointed him deputy director of the new Theater de l'Europe, along with Giorgio Strehler. From 1983 to 1990 he was artistic director of the Teatro di Roma. In 1990 he was appointed advisor for theatrical activities at the 92nd Seville Universal Exhibition. He was artistic director of the Teatro Eliseo in Rome until 1999 when he went on to direct the Théâtre des Italiens in Paris. In 2004, he returned to his country to direct the Italian company and since 2006, he has been director of the Venice Theater Biennale again.