Another film which doesn’t seem to have found any kind of distribution in Italy so far, although it might well get a release at some point this year.  Here’s the blurb according to Cineuropa:

Alessandro Piva’s career path has been an odd one. After debuting with the ultra-indie Lacapagira in 2000 and eight years after his sophomore effort My Brother-in-Law, one of Italy’s authentic outsiders returns with a film years in the making, which is still searching for a distributor.

With regards to his debut, he’s changed locations (from Bari to Rome), but not the pulp, Tarantino-esque atmospheres. Based on the novel by Giovanni Mastrangelo, Henry focuses on warring groups of drug traffickers fighting for the heroin – in slang, “Henry” – market in the Italian capital.

It’s an old-fashioned noir story (always surprising in Italy, where genre films are rarely made), in which Gianni (Michele Riondino) and his girlfriend Nina (Carolina Crescentini) get sucked into when Gianni goes to his dealer’s house and finds the latter dead his living room. The proof against the unlucky Gianni is overwhelming, but the scrupulous detective Silvestri (Claudio Gioè) wants to get to the heart of the matter with the help of his colleague (Paolo Sassanelli). While the official investigation is underway, Nina investigates as well, as tough at her job (as a fitness instructor) as she is in life.

All this against the backdrop of a Rome “inhabited only by immigrants,” explains the director, be they Apulian or African. “They feel like fish out of water,” adds Piva (who also writes and edits here). Rather than updating the conventions of the old cop drama, this geographical and linguistic mix is instead mostly used to lighten up the film. And the already tenuous tension is forced to cede to robust injection of vernacular comedy.

Blending elements of mystery, comedy and auteur cinema (the characters have long monologues or speak into the camera), the film that emerges is as mixed as the city it wants to depict. Viewers will decide whether this is a vice or a virtue.

The only domestic title in competition at the Turin Film Festival, Henry is produced by Piva’s Seminal Film with Bianca Film, with a contribution from the Ministry of Culture (MiBAC).

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Just taking a look through some of the films made in Italy last year, and there are a number which just seem to have… well, disappeared.  So, here’s a rundown of the missing titles: these may have been shown at festivals, but received no wider release as far as I can tell (0r which simply passed me by).  So, to start with… Colpevole, directed by Vincenzo De Carolis.

The only information I can find on this anywhere is a listing on IMDB, which gives the plot as:

A quiet middle class man wakes up in a hospital after a terrible car crash. His two beautiful daughters and wife are there next to him. At home he starts to have nightmares about killing a woman. Doctors say it’s his imagination, but…

It lists it as being an action / thriller, approximately 120 minutes long and shot on an estimated budget of €500,000.  It received a release at the Drake International Film Festival in Naples on January 2010.

Beyond that, though… nada.  There’s no poster, no reviews, no website.  And as for a trailer…  you gotta be kidding.  So heaven knows what happened to it.  It’s a shame, as it sounds rather interesting.  Vincenzo De Carolis has been around a while, he made a film called Lorenzo va in letargo back in 1992.

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Just out in Italy, A Morte!, directed by Gianluca Sulis.  I’m not quite sure what to make of this one: it looks like it has an interesting premise, but one which could easily become bogged down in polemic and, well, talk.  It goes something like this:

After a brief stint working in a call center, Mark, a young graduate, tries to finance his masters degree by performing as a clown.  Faced with a reality in which both university professors and politicians charm people with false promises, Mark and some friends, driven by a deep desire for justice as well as anger and desperation, carry out an apparently crazy gesture: kidnapping two representatives of the cynival and venal world they find themselves: a professor and a politician.

Mark chooses an old abandoned mine to act as his prison, where he holds them and subjects them to a series of idiosyncratic interviews as he attempts to find answers to the problems of life.

This was a small budget production, costing just €65,000, from a new director and with an unkownn cast, and it has only opened in two cinemas, so we shouldn’t expect too much of it.  But at least it marks a break from the usual comedies that clog up the Italian box office over the xmas period…

Here’s the trailer (Italian only):

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Noi credevamo

Just out in Italy, Mario Martone’s Noi credevamo, a historical epic set during the time of Italian unification which was hotly tipped at the Venice Festival.  Martone’s got quite a reputation behind him: he doesn’t make many films, but when he does they tend to be pretty good (see 1995′s L’amore molesto and 2001′s Lulu).  This also has a prestigious cast including the ubiquitous Toni Servillio, Luigi Lo Cascio (Baaria, Good Morning Night) and Luca Barbareschi (Cannibal Holocaust(!)).

Here’s the review from Cineuropa:

The much-anticipated Italian film in competition at the 67th Venice Film Festival, Mario Martone’s We Believed is a 170-minute-long journey into nineteenth-century Italian history through the destinies of three boys from the South.

Loosely based on real historical events and on Anna Banti ’s eponymous novel, the film has obvious links with the present. “We Believed is constructed from rigorously historical material”, explained Martone at the press conference. “We wanted viewers to be the ones to create the connection with the present. We didn’t want to give a nod to current events, but bring nineteenth-century language alive, delving into the fabric of our present”.

To make the connection with today’s world more obvious, the director does however use a few visual devices: a modern garage, a prison still used in the 1970s for the Red Brigade terrorists and one of the monstrous buildings that blight the southern coast.

Co-screenwriter Giancarlo De Cataldo described the adventure of a journey through the many documents and letters with which “we constructed this story, until we felt transported to that era. Free from prejudice”. Indeed, there are two opposing theories about the Risorgimento: one sees it as the endeavour of young and beautiful heroes fighting for Italian unity, while in reality the different factions remained hostile; and another represents it as a sort of “deception” perpetrated to the detriment of a population that didn’t want to be freed at all and adored the Bourbon kings and popes.

In the film, after the fierce Bourbon repression of the 1828 uprisings, involving their families in Cilento, Domenico, Angelo and Salvatore decide to join Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy. Their future lives as conspirators and revolutionaries are told in four episodes, up to Italian Unification, through insurrections, anti-monarchist attacks, Garibaldi expeditions, long periods of imprisonment and shootings. This is all heightened by Hubert Westkemper’s original music compositions and pieces by Verdi, Bellini and Rossini conducted by Roberto Abbado.

To describe the tragic events, conflicts and incurable divisions that gave birth to Italy, Martone has cast some promising young talents (Andrea Bosca, Edoardo Natoli, Luigi Pisani); rising stars of Italian cinema (Michele Riondino, Stefano Cassetti, Guido Caprino, Peppino Mazzotta, Giovanni Calcagno); and established actors (Luigi Lo Cascio, Valerio Binasco, Luca Zingaretti, Andrea Renzi, Luca Barbareschi, Fiona Shaw, Renato Carpentieri, Ivan Franek, Franco Ravera and Roberto de Francesco). Toni Servillo is a gloomy Giuseppe Mazzini, while Francesca Inaudi and Anna Buonaiuto play Cristina di Belgiojoso, whose Parisian drawing room was a meeting place for exiles and intellectuals.

We Believed was produced for a budget of between €6-7m by Palomar, Rai Cinema and Rai Fiction in co-production with Les Films d’Ici and Arte France Cinéma.

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Just out in Italy, Saverio Costanzo’s La solitudine dei numeri primi, aka The Solitude of Prime Numbers.  This is an odd sounding one, a ‘horror-romance’, spanning twenty years and starring Alba Rohrwacher, Luca Marinelli and Isabella Rossellini.  This has had a big release domestically, but the international reviewers have been… well, underwhelmed.

For example, this is what Hollywood Reporter has to say about it:

You know something’s off in a film when the only character you can identify with is played by Isabella Rossellini, whose small but significant role is by far the best thing about Saverio Costanzo’s supposed horror romance, “The Solitude of Prime Numbers.”

Based on the eponymous novel by Paolo Giordano, who co-wrote the script with Costanzo, the story’s simple premise is forced by the ambitiously self-indulgent handling of the material. Horror nods to “The Shining” (long tracking shots of empty hallways), “Carrie” and even “Heathers,” along with constant ominous music and eerie sing-song, bury what is actually a psychological drama about two outcasts who understand one another because they’re both damaged souls.

“Prime Numbers” is guaranteed a large domestic rollout on September 10 by co-producer Medusa Film but the art film will not make much of a box office splash with wider audiences. Arthouse and festival venues are its best hope for an international life.

The film spans over 20 years through four time periods that, once established, are later mixed in a series of flashbacks. The two main characters, the film’s lonely “prime numbers,” are introduced in 1984. Mattia (Tommaso Neri) is a bright little kid with an autistic sister (Giorgia Pizzo) he must care for. Alice (Martina Albano) has an overbearing father who pushes her beyond her capabilities on a skiing trip. Both will undergo a traumatic experience that is revealed later on.

In 1991, the two meet in high school. Alice (Arianna Nastro), a shy sophomore with a limp bullied by the class queens, is drawn to Mattia (Vittorio Lomartire), a severely withdrawn but brilliant student who has started cutting himself.

In 2001, Alice (played as an adult by Alba Rohrwacher) is working as a photographer and Mattia (Luca Marinelli), nearly catatonic, is heading to Germany to get his Ph.D.. They are best friends although Alice has never been to Mattia’s house and finds out about his sister from Mattia’s mother (Rossellini, truly wonderful).

The ensuing flashbacks explaining their traumas are drawn out so tediously, mixed with events from 1991 and 2001, that the tension simply wears itself out. What’s worse, to establish why they understand one another’s solitary pain, Mattia and Alice’s backstories are handled with equal gravitas. Alice’s accident is sad but the kind of event that happens daily. Mattia’s tragedy is immense and carries immeasurably greater weight.

Back in 2001, when Mattia and Alice skirt with love as adults, is when the film hits its peak of pretension. In the film’s most overwrought set piece, Mattia accompanies Alice to shoot the wedding of the girl (Aurora Ruffino) who most tortured Alice during school. They stare at each other from across a crowded room in interminably long close-ups, until he disappears into an “Amarcord”-like fog that rolls into the building.

In 2008, the two meet again. Alice has become anorexically thin and is going through a divorce and nervous breakdown. Mattia instead has put on weight and is cutting himself regularly. Audiences can only hope they finally get together to make the film’s two hours worthwhile.

Costanzo clearly pushes Rohrwacher to the limit, and thankfully she can go there, but the fact that he had his actors drastically change their bodies for the film’s shortest segment is further testament to the director’s self-indulgence. For his part, Marinelli is wasted in a performance that consists mostly of intense stares and a lot of gazing at the ground.

Here’s the trailer:

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