Italy's Saint-Vincent Prize, a leading festival designed to promote Italian cinema abroad, has announced that for the first time this year it will dedicate a section to the fast-growing field of Italian TV drama.

The new TV competition, sponsored by Italy's weekly TV Sorrizi & Canzoni magazine, will be judged both by readers and by a separate jury of TV critics. The readers' jury will award prizes for best actor and best actress of a TV drama and a soap. Critics will award prizes for best production, best director, best screenplay and best music.

Festival director Felice Laudadio, who is also the head of Rome's Cinecitta Holding and the artistic director of the Taormina Film Festival, said the festival will also award a career prize to Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, whose recently completed Resurrection, a major 2-part TV adaptation of the Tolstoy novel, will be unveiled at New York's Moma in October.

The next edition of the St Vincent Prize, which is held in a mountain resort in the province of Valle d'Aosta near the Italo-French border, will be held from October 23-28. It will see 15 feature films compete for a prestigious "Grolla d'Oro."