Italian and Film Studies Professor's Long-Running Film Festival

For Giovanna De Luca, founding director of the Nuovo Film Festival and professor of Italian and film studies, it’s not the red carpet, the directors, the actors or the parties that inspire her to direct and produce the festival every year; it’s the moment she takes a seat in the darkened theater and watches the films come alive on the screen. It takes her back in time to her childhood in Naples, Italy.  

“I’ve been obsessed with cinema my whole life,” she says. “My mother loved the musicals with Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Gene Kelly, and my uncle was an actor, so I was exposed to the arts from a very young age. Cinema is deeply respected in Italian culture.”  

Teaching film studies seemed like the perfect career, but Italy is very patriarchal, especially academia, so De Luca left Naples for New York to pursue a doctorate in comparative literature with a specialization in film studies. 

Fast forward 11 years to 2004, when De Luca moved with her family to Charleston to teach Italian studies and comparative literature at the College, along with her favorite class (and many students’), Mafia in the Movies.But moving to the Lowcountry was a big transition – access to international film screenings was scarce, and the Film Studies Program at the College was small. It wasn’t long before De Luca started dreaming about launching a film festival. In 2006, she made the dream a reality. 

“The first year, we featured a retrospective on an Italian director, and the turnout was dismal,” laughs De Luca. “No one was interested in a retrospective. The festival has grown so much since that first year, but we’ve never strayed from our mission of exposing students to international films and involving them in the production of the event. We let them do everything, from interviewing the filmmakers to scheduling events and screening films.” 

Daniel Colella ’20 interned at the festival as a videographer when he was an undergraduate English major and film studies minor, capturing the festival and marketing it to the student body. 

“Meeting and learning from Dr. De Luca was one of the most rewarding experiences in my college career,” he says.  

The 17th annual festival in November featured 13 films from established and emerging directors, and all of them said something important about Italian culture and society. 

“None of these movies are big-budget blockbusters; none show off high-tech special effects,” says De Luca. “Instead, the movies – like most Italian productions – are human-scaled, focused on aspects of real life.” 

And bringing a little bit of Italy to life in the Lowcountry.