Italy bans arthouse film

BY BRUCE JOI-LNSTON ROME CORRESPONDEN7
1-raix's film industry has reacted angrily yo a government decision to ban a film, paradoxically funded by the state, in which Christian symbols are shown in a blatantly sexual context.
Entitled Tom the visse due zulte (Toto who lived twice), the film includes scenes in which an angel is sodomised, a man masturbating against a
f
statue o the Virgin Mary, and a bad-tempered Jesus grudgingly raising Mafia victims from the dead after they have been dissolved in acid.
The film by Daniele Cipri and Franco Moresco, controversial directors whose iconoclastic works feature amateur and earthy Sicilian actors, was partly financed with a £400,000 grant from Italy's Fine Arts and Culture ministry. The ministry is headed by Walter Veltroni, the deputy prime minister, which appointed the panel that banned the film three days before its release in Italy 'We're the real religious figures here,"
the directors said. "We won't much as a comma." Andrea so mma."
Andrea Occipini, who produced the new film, called the ban " a decision unworthy of a democratic country", and a product of a "medieval climate", adding: "I feel like Salman Rushdie with his Satanic Verses." "This is the paradox," he continued. "On the one hand the government has recognised the film's artistic worth, On the other, a panel which is the expression of the government, has banned k." The country's left-wing Press has attacked the ban, calling it a return to "the Italy of old", in which critically acclaimed films like Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, Passolini's La Ricotta, and MontyPython's Of Brian, were banned Life
or
attacked. The most recent case was Martin Scorcese's Last Temptation of Christ.