A 100-year-old law in Italy that allows film censorship has finally been scrapped. In a statement, Italy’s Culture Minister Dario Franceschini said: “Film censorship has been abolished. And the system of controls and interventions that still allow the state to intervene in the freedom of artists has been definitively ended.” For more than a century, the Italian government was able to block the release of a new film or demand edits on moral or religious reasons. Marco Werman speaks with Antonio Iannotta, artistic director of the San Diego Italian Film Festival, about how film censorship worked in Italy and why it took so long to abolish it.
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