Wenders to shoot film in Calabria - 3D movie to focus on immigrant experience
Catanzaro, July 24 - German director Wim Wenders is to shoot a 3D film in Calabria about the experience of immigrants in the region, Calabria governor Agazio Loiero said Friday.

Shooting for the film, entitled The Flight, will begin on September 7 in the seaside town of Scilla, near Reggio Calabria.

''This is one of the most important things that has happened in the last four and a half years that I have been governor,'' said Loiero.

''Calabria is not just about (crime syndicate) 'Ndrangheta, but also and above all about hospitality. Since the seventh century BC Calabria has been offering hospitality to strangers without asking where they come from.

''Hospitality is part of our culture and is in our DNA,'' he said, adding that the ''most famous immigrant'' welcomed into the region was the Greek mathematician Pythagoras, who left his native island of Samos for the Calabrian city of Crotone as a young man.

Wenders will recount the experiences of immigrants beginning ten years ago in the town of Badolato as well as in Riace, Caulonia and Stignano.

''These are four towns which, whether governed by the centre-left or centre-right, show how in Calabria hospitality is not just an ideological issue but a question of culture,'' Loiero said.

''Calabria was also the first region to pass a law promoting hospitality and the integration of refugees and asylum seekers in its territory, joining this with the socio-economic development of local communities.

''It was a choice that bucked the trend in a country that seems to show itself more xenophobic every day''.

The film is to star 78-year-old American actor Ben Gazzara as a town mayor where a local child, who will be cast in Calabria, is unable to organise a football match as people move away from the town to find work.

WENDERS PREVIOUSLY FILMED THRILLER IN PALERMO.

This will not be the first time Wenders has set a film in Italy.

His 2008 romantic thriller Palermo Shooting was set in the Sicilian capital and starred German rock star Campino as a successful photographer, Finn, who decides to make a clean break from his past, embarking on a new life in Palermo.

Finn's love interest was played by award-winning Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who appeared on cinema screens around the world in the 2007 film adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's classic novel, Love In The Time Of Cholera, with Javier Bardem.

Palermo Shooting was released in Germany in November and had its United States' premier in January at the Berlin and Beyond Film Festival. Wenders was born in Dusseldorf in August 1945, the son of a chief surgeon at a local Catholic hospital.

He went on to study medicine at university but dropped out after two terms. He then tried philosophy and later sociology before abandoning university studies altogether and focusing on art and, in particular, watercolour painting.

He moved to Paris in 1966 where he became hooked on films. Returning to Germany two years later, he entered film school and began working as a cinema critic.

After making several short films, he graduated from film school with his first feature-length movie, a black-and-white budget drama called Summer in the City (1970).

But it was his next film, The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty (1972) - a powerful piece about a goalkeeper who goes mad after being sent off the pitch and murders a cinema cashier - which began to stir interest.

In the meantime, he joined more than a dozen other German filmmakers in setting up a production and distribution cooperative which eventually became the nucleus of the 1970s New German Cinema movement.

Paris, Texas, made in 1984, established Wenders' cult status. The film, which Wenders wrote with acclaimed American playwright and actor Sam Shepard, won the top prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.

Other successful Wenders films include Wings of Desire (1987), Buena Vista Social Club and The Million Dollar Hotel (2000).

Wenders has also published a number of books, including several featuring his photography, essays and reflections on film-making.