Film presentato da ESMÈ SCIARONI Antonio, a young carabiniere from Calabria, is tasked with accompanying eleven-year-old Rosetta, prostituted by her mother, and her little brother Luciano to an orphanage in Civitavecchia, which, however, refuses to take them in. The journey continues to an institute in Sicily. The heart of this very beautiful and important film lies in the relationship between the officer and the children: slow conquest, closeness, osmosis. Thanks to Antonio, the two children – who in Amelio’s film are always immature adults in disguise – learn for a few days to be children again. Although faithful to a high ideal of cinema that speaks through the unsaid and tends to express the inexpressible, Amelio has made a film thrilling even in its toughness and refusal of any kind of consolation. His unadorned concreteness can be captured in the way, low-toned and lucid, in which he bears witness to Italy, both in its landscape (a mixture of decay and prosperity) and in the calm resignation of the “little” people of Calabria and Sicily. At least two memorable sequences: the lunch in Calabria and the swim in the sea. Jury’s Grand Prize at Cannes and the Felix as best European film. (Morandini). |
