Euro fests hit L.A.

France and Italy ready to show reel talent

By LEONARD KLADY

France and Italy are mounting simultaneous assaults on L.A. audiences in late April.

The First Festival of Italian Film will present premieres and in-person tributes to Roberto Benigni, Franco Nero and Giancarlo Giannini from April 24 to May 1.

The third "City of Lights, City of Angels: A Week of New French Films" will unspool April 27-May 1 with new films from directors Bertrand Tavernier and Patrice Chereau and Catherine Deneuve's Cesar-nominated "Place Vendome."

The Italian fest's genesis stems from L.A.'s Italian Cultural Centre, which has run annual programs of films and co-sponsored events with UCLA that have honored such people as Francesco Rosi and Bernardo Bertolucci.

Giannini cops tribute

The maiden effort will include 15 recent vintage Italian productions including "No Deposit, No Return," starring Giannini (as a cop shaking down a couple of small-town thieves), which will be presented during the actor's tribute evening.

The 1967 film musical of "Camelot," starring Nero as Lancelot, will be presented at his event.

Benigni will be honored with a screening of the 1979 Marco Ferreri pic "My Asylum," recently acquired by Sceneries Intl. for U.S. theatrical distribution, in which he played a sensitive kindergarten teacher.

Screenings will be held at the Music Hall, Harmony Gold and the Raleigh Studio.

The curtain raiser for the Italian fest will be the world premiere of "La Bomba," a New York-set comedy about waiters posing as gang members who run afoul of the real banditos. The film's stars -- Alessandro and Vittorio Gassman and Shelley Winters -- are set to attend.

Other films to be screened include Sergio Citti contempo religious parable "We Free Kings" based on an unproduced Pasolini script and starring Patrick Bauchau; "Ordinary Hero," directed and starring Michele Placido as a Vatican banker caught up in international politics; the highly controversial political-religious triptych "Toto Who Lived Twice"; and the comedy "Elvis & Marilyn" about Eastern European celebrity impersonators on the road to a contest in Italy.

Organizers are in negotiations to close the event with Franco Zeffirelli's "Tea with Mussolini," starring Cher, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Judi Dench and Lily Tomlin.

Information is available by calling Spirit of Italy offices at [phone].

Back to school

The French program will open with "It Starts Today," when filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier presents his much-lauded Berlin-preemed drama centering on a preschool teacher in economically depressed Northern France.

This year's event includes two Cesar best pic nominees, filmmaker Nicole Garcia's thriller "Place Vendome" set in the world of jewelry traders and Chereau's operatic "Those Who Love Me Take the Train," in which a funeral brings together a diverse and eccentric group of mourners. Also screening are the family animated adventure "Kirikou and the Sorceress," an African folk tale, and "Hinterland" in which a television actor returns to his village and comes face to face with a series of old personal villains.

All screenings, plus the midweek "New Wave, Next Wave" symposium, will be held at the Directors Guild. Program and ticket information is available by calling [phone].