Via Castellana Bandiera: Elena
Cotta plays Samira
Via Castellana Bandiera: Director
and star, Emma Dante plays Rosa.
Venice
- Lido: Venice70 Film Festival – Via Castellana Bandiera – Emma Dante. Shut inside their cars, two women face off in
a silent duel that is fought out in the intimate violence of their stares. A
wholly female duel punctuated by the refusal to drink, eat and sleep; more
obstinate than the sun of Palermo and more stubborn than the ferocity of the
men who surround them. For, as in every duel, it is a question of life or
death... It’s a Sunday afternoon. The sirocco is blowing pitilessly in Palermo
when Rosa (Emma Dante, also director of the movie) and Clara (Alba Rohrwacher) lose their
way in the streets of the city and end up in a sort of alley: Via Castellana
Bandiera. At the same moment, another car driven by Samira (Elena Cotta),
crammed with members of the Calafiore family, arrives from the opposite
direction and enters the same street. Neither Rosa at the wheel of her
Multipla, nor Samira, the old and stubborn woman driving a Punto, is willing to
give way to the other, while the Calafiore family goes back into the
unauthorized apartment house in which they live and, with the complicity of the
local inhabitants, start taking bets on which of the two women will stick to
her ground the longest. Evening falls, and then night creeps into the street
and the houses of the neighborhood, but the two women, resisting hunger, sleep
and thirst, seem to persevere in a mulishness that no longer has anything
rational about it, and continue to refuse to give way...
