The International Documentary Film Festival of Florence, known in Italy as the Festival dei Popoli, is staging a special viewing here of ten films especially chosen for the city of New York.
The viewing, from May 29 to 31, is being held at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center in the borough of Staten Island and is the festival's first visit to New York.
The three-day event is part of a new policy at the Festival dei Popoli to show off its archives of documentaries, begun in 1959.
''We are investing a lot in cinema. This is a very important cultural initiative which uses documentaries as a key to an in-depth understanding of reality,'' Tuscany's regional councillor for culture, Paolo Cocchi, said at the Italian Culture Center here during the presentation of the festival.
Festa dei Popoli Director Giorgio Bonsanti was also on hand and observed that ''New York offers us an excellent occasion to give the festival an international dimension''.
''We have almost 10,000 documentaries in our film library as well as research materials and a specialist library,'' he added.
Among the documentaries chosen for the New York viewing are films on the preparations for the historic 1967 peace march, the immigration center on Ellis Island and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, which just marked its 125th anniversary.
