Gere coming to Giffoni's kids film fest

Children from 50 countries to judge contenders

(ANSA) - Giffoni Valle Piana, July 18 - The red carpet of the Giffoni Children's Film Festival has hosted plenty of A-list celebrities. These include the likes Robert De Niro, Oliver Stone, Meryl Streep, Samuel L. Jackson, Jeremy Irons, John Travolta, Wim Wenders, Meg Ryan, Kathy Bates, Krzystof Kieslowsky, Roman Polanski, Emir Kusturica, Jon Voight, Susan Sarandon, Edward Norton, Nicolas Cage, Mira Sorvino, Naomi Watts, Winona Ryder, Danny de Vito, Sergio Leone, Sacha Baron Cohen, Giancarlo Giannini, and Ugo Tognazzi, just to name a few.

Starting on Friday and running through July 27, the Giffoni Film Festival brings children's films to the centre stage. The small town of Giffoni Valle Piana, 40 kilometers from Salerno, whose name is now synonymous with filmmaking, will host the festival's 44th edition, and this year another great Hollywood star, Richard Gere, will be making an appearance as a guest. Over the years, the number of children serving as jurors has grown to reach 3,500; other guests were announced on social media. The "meet & greet" tickets, where the public meets the stars, sold out in record time of under eight minutes. Many of the guests were invited based on recommendations that came from among the film festival's 33,700 Twitter followers and 103,000 Facebook fans, making the film festival's page the most interactive in the world.

The most eagerly awaited guests are Alan Rickman, who plays Headmaster of Hogwarts Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series; Lea Michele who plays the talented Rachel Berry in the popular TV series Glee; Matt Bomer, star of White Collar; Dylan O'Brien, star of TV series Teen Wolf and film The Maze Runner; Ryan Guzman, star of Step Up All In, which will have its Italian premier at the festival; and Micaela Riera, taking the reigns from Violetta on the Disney Channel in Cata e i misteri della sfera, an Italian-dubbed version of the Spanish-language Argentinian series Senales del fin del mundo. The turning point for the children's film festival came when Francois Truffaut, who visited this small town in Campania in 1982, wrote in an open letter: "Of all the film festivals, Giffoni is the most necessary." Children from 50 different countries across all seven continents turn the Giffoni Film Festival into an extraordinary life experience and friendship-building experience for the young jurors.