photo credit - official still - Netflix - courtesy La Biennale di VeneziaThe story of a young man’s heartbreak and liberation in Naples, Italy. It’s the 1980s and 17-year old Fabietto Schisa might be an awkward Italian teen struggling to find his place, but he finds joy in an amazing family who love life, relish mischief and take deep pleasure in meddling in one another’s complicated relationships. Then comes a pair of events that alter everything. One is the triumphant arrival in Naples of a god-like athletic legend: high-flying soccer idol Maradona, who has Fabietto, and the whole scrappy city, feeling a pride that once seemed impossible. The other is an inconceivable accident that will drop the bottom out of Fabietto’s world—setting his future in motion. Seemingly saved by Maradona, touched by chance or the hand of God, Fabietto wrestles with the nature of fate, the confusion of loss, and the intoxicating freedom of being alive. In his most movingly personal film, Sorrentino takes audiences on a sensory journey bursting with the contrasts of tragedy and comedy, love and desire, absurdity and beauty, as Fabietto finds the only way out of total catastrophe through his own imagination.
"The Hand of God is a coming-of-age story that aims, stylistically, to avoid the traps of conventional autobiography: hyperbole, victimhood, pity, compassion, and the indulgence of pain, through a simple, sparse, and essential staging and with neutral, sober music and photography. Cinematography’s apparatus will take a step back so as to let the life of those years speak, in the way I remember them—in the way I experienced them, felt them. Simply put, this is a film about sensibility. And hovering above everything, so close and yet so far, is Maradona, that ghostly idol, five foot five, who seemed to sustain the lives of everyone in Naples, or at least mine."
Toni Servillo
"Land of Dreams developed out of a collaboration with Jean-Claude Carriere, a journey that began back in 2018 in Paris until his death in January 2021.
The film was inspired by our personal journeys as two Iranian immigrants living in America since the 1970s, and Jean-Claude’s grasp of the American culture as a French citizen. The narrative is therefore, an expression of our sensibilities and point of views as three foreigners about a country that we all love and yet dare to criticise.
Stylistically the film has become a convergence of a deeply personal, visual and conceptual language with Jean-Claude Carrière’s legendary signature as a scriptwriter with his sense of wit, humour and humanity."
Sheila Vand, Matt
Dillon, William Moseley, Isabella Rossellini, Christopher McDonald, Anna
Gunn, Joaquin de Almeida, Robin Bartlett, Gaius Charles, Nicole
Ansari-Cox, Mohammad B. Ghaffari  Land of Dreams Shahkroh Galame and Sheila Vand  Lido di Venezia Lungomare Guglielmo Marconi |
