Cinepanettoni and Cliques
- Margherita
- Sep 9
- 10 min read
Updated: Sep 16
The False Myths of Italian Cinema

The case of Rexal Ford, a.k.a. Francis Kaufmann—the alleged “Villa Pamphili killer” and supposed director—sparked a massive, and in many ways justified, controversy over public funding for Italy’s audiovisual industry.
Justified not because Kaufmann allegedly killed his wife and their eleven-month-old daughter—history is full of murderous artists and criminals, from Caravaggio to Jean Genet to Roman Polanski—but because, through his production company Coevolutions, he received €836,000 in tax credits for a film that, apparently, was never even made.
Once that came to light, all hell broke loose.
Outraged statements from Meloni, Minister Giuli, and their chorus of allies denounced the “outrage” of wasted cinema funds. A coordinated attack on the left followed: accused of cronyism, of financing murderers and criminals or, at best, pampered radical-chic directors who churn out useless, ugly, and boring films—ignored by distributors and, when they do miraculously make it to theaters (thanks to luck or the usual connections), manage to attract four coins and ten Manzoni-esque spectators.
It must be said at the outset: these criticisms contain a grain of truth, as shown by the grotesque Rexal Ford affair.
But it must also be said that, as often happens, a complex issue has been simplified and distorted for the sake of political point-scoring.
Turned into a blunt weapon against any given Claudio Amendola, painted as the prototype of the “communist” artist and publicly flogged in right-wing media according to the famous motto: “punish one to educate a hundred.” Turned, in short, into a cudgel against the supposed cultural hegemony of the left. And it’s downright blasphemous that such words come from people like Lucia Bergonzoni, the League’s undersecretary for Culture, who proudly declares that she doesn’t read books—something you might forgive Carlos Alcaraz, who makes a living as a tennis prodigy, but not someone holding an institutional role in Culture.
That’s why it’s worth bringing some clarity to the question of funding for Italy’s cultural industry—emphasis on industry—and dismantling a few myths that circulate in print and online.
Let’s start with the business model. It’s bizarre that in Italy success is still judged almost exclusively by box-office sales and ticket numbers—as if cinema hadn’t radically changed over the past forty years. As if streaming distribution, television, and pay-channels didn’t exist. As if we could pretend not to know that the economics of film are largely opaque, and that it’s practically impossible to determine how much a movie really makes.
Leaving aside incentives—which cover costs but don’t count as revenue—how does a film actually make money? Box office (in steady decline), home video (crucial twenty years ago, marginal today), international sales, runs on national broadcasters and pay-TV (RAI, Mediaset, Sky), licensing to platforms (Netflix, Prime Video, Apple), remake rights, product placement (think James Bond’s car), merchandising (relevant only for global franchises like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Avengers, Avatar).
The box office, then, is just a slice of the pie. For Italian or European films, it accounts for about 30% of revenues on average, considering that half of ticket sales stay with theaters. In Italy, even many commercial hits don’t break even on tickets alone.
Take Il primo Natale by Ficarra and Picone: in 2019 it grossed €15 million against a €12 million budget. By Italian standards that looks like a triumph, but box office alone would have covered just over 60% of costs. On the other hand, Perfect Strangers (budget €3–4 million, domestic box office €16 million, estimated foreign revenues €30 million, plus TV rights and countless remakes worth hundreds of millions) was a gold mine. But that’s the exception, not the rule—and cultural policies cannot be built on lucky breaks.
The inevitable comparison is with Hollywood: useful in theory, impossible in practice. In the U.S.—where state incentives also exist—success is measured primarily at the box office, while in Italy (and Europe) secondary rights are decisive.
The reasons are both structural and cultural. Structurally, American cinema has a natural market of about half a billion English-speakers, compared with Italy’s sixty million; theaters are far more numerous and widespread—one for every 8,000 people, versus one for every 17,000 in Italy—and the industry is concentrated in a handful of giant studios with immense capital, able to finance billion-dollar blockbusters and, with the profits, sustain smaller or more experimental works. Super-productions in the U.S. can cost $400 million and gross $3 billion worldwide: unimaginable figures in Italy, where in 2023—the “good” year—total production spending barely reached €700 million, with average budgets of €3–4 million per film.
In Italy, production is fragmented: a few medium-large companies (De Laurentiis, Cattleya, Palomar, Fandango, Medusa, Rai Cinema) and a swarm of tiny firms that rarely make more than one or two films a year. Culturally, the gap is equally stark: in the U.S., cinema is primarily entertainment and market; in Italy, though still a business, it is also seen as cultural heritage, identity, and artistic language, something to be protected and subsidized. Added to that is Italy’s long tradition of free television, which accustomed audiences to watch movies at home and made them less willing to pay for a ticket.
And indeed, the global trend is declining theater audiences. In the U.S., ticket sales fell from 1.85 billion in 2002 (5.5 tickets per person) to just over 850 million in 2023. In Italy: from 111 million in 2002 (1.8 per person) to 70.5 million in 2023. The reasons: platforms, Covid, and a profound shift in viewing habits.
Given all this, it’s absurd to reduce the crisis of Italian cinema to the supposed radical-chic tendencies of its productions. The real problem is that we’re judging the industry with outdated business models and splitting into two camps: those who see cinema only as an industry, a commodity for consumption, and those who insist it is art—even if made with industrial means. In Italy, anything that smacks of art, culture, or social engagement is automatically branded elitist, boring, and “left-wing.” With such prejudices—and the right’s inferiority complex—the debate remains stuck. After all, how can you argue seriously with those who propose cinepanettoni as models of counterculture?
Cinema, in truth, escapes this sterile dichotomy. It is almost always a hybrid product: industrial, designed for mass consumption, yet capable of carrying ethical, aesthetic, and social content. Think of Ken Loach, Scorsese, Coppola, Lumet, Kubrick, Almodóvar, Woody Allen—and in Italy, neorealism, Visconti, the civic cinema of Rosi, Lizzani and Petri, Scola, the Taviani brothers, Monicelli, Moretti, or Paola Cortellesi with There’s Still Tomorrow.
Most film production falls precisely in this fertile hybrid space, which has produced and continues to produce excellent results—ignoring ideological simplifications.
Personally, I believe cinema must embrace all these dimensions, with the right to critique but also the duty not to confuse works that are radically different. To borrow a literary analogy: it’s perfectly fine to read and enjoy The Da Vinci Code (pure entertainment), but that doesn’t negate the value of One Hundred Years of Solitude or Of Mice and Men (popular storytelling and art together), and it’s impossible to imagine a world without Journey to the End of the Night—elitist, fiercely controversial, written by a self-declared right-wing author, yet still one of the towering novels of the 20th century.
My preferred idea of cinema remains the one invoked—through a Marxist lens—by Guido Aristarco, who wrote:
“Cinema is both art and industry, but its value does not lie in the mechanics of production: it lies in the artist’s ability to give critical form to reality through an industrial tool” (Storia delle teorie del film, 1951). “A cinema that merely entertains is just another commodity. A cinema that interprets the world becomes art and collective conscience” (Cinema Nuovo, 1954).
If cinema must be defended in its entirety, it’s clear that some works need stronger protection because, by nature, they are destined for smaller audiences.
On paper, the Ministry of Culture (MIC) does precisely this: it sustains the audiovisual industry (film, TV, video games) through tax credits, rewards quality and/or commercial success through automatic contributions, and promotes cinema as an artistic and cultural product through selective contributions.
Automatic contributions finance works based on results achieved: prizes, festival selections, ticket sales, streaming views, international sales. Each achievement generates a credit, calculated on objective parameters, which can only be used if reinvested in new productions. The goal is a circular form of self-financing: stabilizing companies in the supply chain and turning the success of one film into momentum for the next. Introduced by the Franceschini reform in 2016 and first applied in 2018, the scheme has been suspended and reintroduced several times. It’s new in Italy but well-established in France, Spain, Canada, Brazil—where disbursements are quicker and amounts higher. Since 2019, about €146 million have gone to documentaries, TV dramas, auteur films, and commercial titles.
The main support tool remains the tax credit: a kind of tax rebate on production costs, used to offset taxes and social contributions. It applies to both Italian and foreign works, provided they meet certain requirements—above all, using local crews and facilities. Foreign productions can only claim credit on the share spent in Italy. To obtain it, detailed expense reports are required, and in theory the MIC must also receive the filmed material. Tax credits are widespread: governments use them to attract productions that feed the local industry. With its 40% rebate, Italy wields a powerful incentive, bolstered by the recognized skill of its crews and its unique art-city backdrops. The downside: bureaucracy that is slow, opaque, and prone to waste and abuse (as the grotesque Rexal Ford case shows). Still, in the last 8–9 years investments have grown enormously, drawing major international productions (House of Gucci, Mission Impossible, The Equalizer). Between 2018 and 2025, the MIC disbursed over €3 billion in tax credits to around 4,000 works.
Then there are the selective contributions, the real lightning rod of controversy, the right’s favorite target, denounced as the swamp where the usual ZTL elites thrive. In fact, they’ve existed since the 1960s, though at times used with excessive discretion. The 2016 Franceschini reform made them more transparent: annual calls, committees, public rankings. Their explicit goal is cultural: to support works with limited audiences that private investors would never finance. They reward artistic and innovative value, promote first-time filmmakers, and protect fragile genres like documentaries, shorts, animation. In Italy and abroad, selective funds are what keep auteur cinema alive, while tax credits sustain industry and mainstream production. According to MIC data, since 2018 they amount to just 7% of audiovisual funds—about €246 million in total, roughly €30 million per year.
So why does such a small sum cause such an uproar, even drawing interventions from the Prime Minister herself? Even if—absurdly—all funds went to “tediously leftist” directors, we’d still be talking about peanuts. But populist politics thrives on simplification: manipulating numbers, telling half-truths, and building distorted perceptions is the name of the game.
Just look at the numbers and titles. 382 documentaries covering a wide range of subjects, many biographical: Maria Pia Fanfani, Domenico Modugno, Italo Calvino, Sergio Marchionne, Versace, Monica Vitti, Ugo Tognazzi, Francesco Crispi, Fellini, Zeffirelli, Eleonora Duse, Altan, Gassman, Sordi, Marina Cicogna, Bernardo Bertolucci… hardly a radical-chic enclave: this is half of 20th-century Italy in all its facets.
66 TV series and films, some aired on RAI with 20–30% share (The Count of Monte Cristo, La Storia, The Girl Who Couldn’t Sing, Marconi: The Man Who Connected the World), others streamed with excellent audience response (The Story of My Family). Elitist cinema? Hardly—these works reached millions.
87 short films: some by famous names, others by complete unknowns, some maybe even by the well-connected. But the cost is laughable: about €2 million in eight years—less than one average Italian feature. Hard to cry scandal.
And then the main course: 701 films, receiving the bulk of funds (€185 million). Here you find everything: interesting debuts not explosive at the box office (The Predators by Pietro Castellitto, son of Sergio—hardly a leftist icon; Bangla by Phaim Bhuiyan, a delightful low-budget film that even spawned a sequel series; Giuseppe Fiorello’s tender Stranizza d’amuri; Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio, Italy’s Oscar submission, which grossed about €4 million). The top Italian film of 2024, The Boy in Pink Pants, grossed €10 million before triumphing on streaming platforms. There are also pop comedies (Put Grandma in the Freezer, Giampaolo Morelli’s debut films), civic cinema (Il Nibbio, on agent Nicola Calipari killed while rescuing Giuliana Sgrena in Iraq), overtly political works like Michele Riondino’s Palazzina Laf—“unbearably leftist,” critics said—yet winner of three Davids and five Silver Ribbons. And there are directors far from “red”: Sergio Castellitto, Giulio Base (Albatross, on right-wing journalist Almerigo Grilz, which flopped with less than €20,000 despite 100 screens), Pupi Avati, still a master regardless of labels.
Alongside them: small masterpieces like Ariaferma or Martin Eden; works by giants like Gianni Amelio, Marco Bellocchio, Francesca Archibugi, Pappi Corsicato, Gabriele Salvatores, Mario Martone, Roman Polanski. Plus polished comedies by seasoned craftsmen: Riccardo Milani, Luca Miniero, Ficarra and Picone, Enrico Vanzina.
The idea that selective contributions were squandered to finance a clique of radical-chic directors with no audience is simply false. The numbers and titles tell a different story: a broad, diverse landscape, blending popular and auteur cinema, from civil engagement to commercial blockbusters, from student shorts to great masters.
So, everything fine? No criticism, no flaws? Of course not. Italian cinema and audiovisuals are in crisis—and have been for years—for structural, industrial, and creative reasons.
As seen, the business model is fragile: few Italian films have international appeal, infrastructure is inadequate, access and mastery of advanced production and post-production technology lags far behind the U.S. and many European countries. The system lacks capital and is fragmented, preventing economies of scale. Result: the sector survives on public funding, stuck in a comfort zone that hinders growth. Is that the left’s fault and its supposed disdain for box-office hits? Perhaps partly. But I doubt Italian cinema can be reborn on the back of cinepanettoni.
To structural weakness you can add creative and acting shortcomings. A country that once produced masters admired worldwide has not seen a generational renewal of equal stature. There are still great directors, but no widespread school ensuring continuity across the three main areas of cinema: entertainment, pure artistry, and the hybrid space that combines quality with mass appeal. Actors? Italy still has excellent professionals, but it’s been a long time since we’ve seen global icons like Loren, Magnani, Sordi, Mastroianni. Television bears some blame: it guarantees popularity but flattens performances. So does excessive regionalism—Verdone’s Roman, Siani’s Neapolitan, Bisio’s Milanese—great for comedy and local audiences, but limiting versatility and reducing international reach.
This is not the place to offer recipes for how to Make Italian Cinema Great Again. I don’t presume to have final answers to an issue long debated by experts. But one point bears repeating: amid this sea of problems, harping on and mocking the “left-wing clique” supposedly dividing up scraps of selective funding is not a serious solution.
Dear right-wing rulers: spend public money better, tighten oversight on funding, simplify procedures,
strengthen industrial chains, guarantee pluralism.
By all means, give more money to your friends if you must—but make sure they are competent,
serious, and prepared. For once, try solving real problems instead of hiding behind propaganda.
Cinepanettoni and Cliques
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