Three Italian films are part of the main competition of the 21st edition of the Rome Film Festival, in the section called “Progressive Cinema”, and among them the first to be presented at the Auditorium is Brianza, the director’s second feature by Simone Catania, the filmmaker who debuted in 2018 with Drive Me Home.
Written by Catania himself together with Fabio Natale and Ugo Chiti, Brianza is a film set in the days after the 2008 economic crisis in that specific territory whose identity is not hard to grasp and which has well-known socio-economic (even anthropological) traits, yet it aims to tell a universal story and one of great topical relevance.
We are precisely in an unspecified small town in the Brianzan territory, where a man named Giorgio Farina runs the family armory business. One day Alberto Fumagalli, a local self-made entrepreneur with an eccentric and over-the-top temperament, comes to his door and persuades him to host in his safe a cash hoard from black-market operations to be subsequently funneled to Switzerland, thereby evading the tax authorities. Giorgio, who has become heavily indebted in the failed attempt to open a cross-border shop, will try to leverage the availability of this new and ambiguous friend to straighten out his situation. What seems like an easy way out, however, turns into a spiral of secrets and dangers that threatens his family, his honor and everything he has always tried to protect.
Brianza: a Clip from the Film
As you could see in the images above, in the roles of Giorgio Farina and Alberto Fumagalli, Brianza brings forward two superb Italian actors, Fausto Russo Alesi and Paolo Pierobon (neither of them from Brianza, incidentally, but acting also means this). With them, and with Simone Catania who wrote and directed, we talked about the film, starting from what constitutes a distinctive identity trait of this drama: a kind of hyperrealism that tells very concrete and real things but which often drives certain elements to paroxysm, in order to make what is being told more pop, if one may use that term, while also giving it an unusual and particular depth.
Here is our interview with the film’s stars and its director, a piece one can reasonably imagine will soon be seen in cinemas across the country.
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