Sunday, August 31, 2014

Venice 71: Film Festival - Anime Nere (Black Souls) - Francesco Munzi


 Photograph courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Venice 71: Film Festival - Anime Nere (Black Souls) - Francesco Munzi.  The story of Anime Nere, directed by Francesco Munzi is of a Calabrian criminal family unfolds like a western set in our own day, where the laws of blood and the vendetta take precedence over everything. A tale that begins in the Netherlands and passes through Milan on its way to Calabria, amid the peaks of the Aspromonte, where everything begins and ends. Anime Nere is the story of three brothers, the sons of a shepherd, close to the ’Ndrangheta, and of their divided soul. Luigi, the youngest, is an international drug dealer. Rocco, Milanese by adoption and a member of the middle class, runs a business funded by his brother’s ill-gotten gains. Luciano, the oldest, cherishes the pathological illusion of a preindustrial Calabria, conducting a gloomy and solitary dialogue with the deads. Leo, his twenty-year-old son, represents the lost generation, without an identity. All he has inherited from his forebears is hatred. As a result of a trivial quarrel he carries out an act of intimidation against a bar under the protection of the rival clan. Anywhere else it would have been no more than a prank. Not in Calabria. It’s the spark that sets off a blaze. Luciano finds himself in the same predicament as at the time his father was killed many years earlier. In a dimension suspended between the archaic and the modern the characters are drawn into the archetypes of tragedy. Staring; Marco Leonardi, Peppino Mazzotta, Fabrizio Ferracane, Anna Ferruzzo and Barbora Bobulova.
Above. Director Francesco Munzi.
 
 Photograph by Marco Leonardi courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Anime Nere