Samen met L’Istituto Italiano di Cultura en de Italian Cineclub presenteren we recente Italiaanse cinema.
Flavio Aulino on the movie he selected for this month:
Riondino and Germano have crafted a powerful film with significant social impact, recapturing the style of Petri and Volonte’.
In his directorial debut, Michele Riondino chose a true story about one of the first mobbing cases in Italy, which was linked to the ILVA steel factory. The factory is notorious for the enormous ecological disaster it caused throughout the area of Taranto. The scandalous situation created by ILVA managers over the years resulted in highly contaminated soil, various illnesses that affected both workers and residents of the region, and abnormal numbers of malformed fetuses and miscarriages. This situation is still undergoing trials.
However, Riondino has left all of this in the background and focuses on another criminal case involving some senior managers of ILVA. The case is about a ruthless mobbing system that the company systematically adopted against some inconvenient or simply overqualified employees to bend their will and convince them to quit in order to save on wages and severance. Caterino Lamanna (played by Riondino) is assigned to one of the toughest jobs within the steel factory. Basile (played by the gigantic Elio Germano), a company manager, notices Caterino’s dissatisfaction and offers him a deal in exchange for a promotion. Basile needs to have a trusted man among the workers to know the unionists’ moves in advance. Caterino, who thinks only of his interests and getting married, accepts and ends up in the infamous LAF Building.
This courageous film, perhaps the first of its kind in many years, deals with realistic themes of denunciation and civil commitment in the wake of directors such as Germi and Petri. The film has already earned five nominations in the upcoming David di Donatello, which will be held in May. The nominations are Best first-time Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Song.