Following the success of their debut feature titled Margins, which told the story of three punk friends in Grosseto in the early years of the 2000s and which was very well received (it won the Audience Award at the International Critics’ Week, and was nominated for two David di Donatello and three Nastri d’Argento), Niccolò Falsetti and Francesco Turbanti return to telling the story of the province and youth with a new film: Dear Cruel World, which will have its world premiere at the Festa del Cinema di Roma in the Freestyle section and will hit theaters on October 22, distributed by Fandango.
This is the official plot:
Albinia, 1999. Giovanna is a twelve-year-old a bit unlucky. She lives with her mother Sabrina, while her father died years ago, but it is to him that she leans in difficult times, and with her imagination she draws him in her mind as if he were the hero of a Japanese cartoon. In that microcosm of provincial life that rests on solid and unwritten rules, Giovanna has a single ally: Mirko, bound to her for life by a blood pact. But when Mirko disappears and the explanations of the grown-ups become increasingly vague, Giovanna decides: she will go to find him, cost what it costs. By her side she will find Ludovica, chronically bullied, nicknamed the Hammer, and her gang of bullies: unlikely companions with whom Giovanna will form an improbable friendship and with whom she will come to face a truth impossible to imagine.
Sritten by Falsetti and Turbanti together with Giovanna Vicari and Tommaso Renzoni, the film features animation inserts based on Zerocalcare’s drawings, as well as original music by Giancane, the long-time collaborator of the Roman cartoonist who had also worked with the two directors on Margins.
Here is what Falsetti and Turbanti have said about Dear Cruel World:
“We met in middle school, in our small town in Maremma, during that strange phase of life when you’re no longer a child and you’re not yet a teenager. We met by laughing at the same things, and almost thirty years later we still laugh. Even back then we found the proposal that the adult world offered to teach us how to grow up incomprehensible, often ridiculous, almost always lacking. Then we moved to the other side; we became the adults who must offer something to the kids, and we discovered that remembering who we were is not enough at all. That’s why Giovanna, on the cusp of the last summer of the previous millennium, in Albinia, discovers that sweet and ruthless taste precisely as she grows up, while searching for her best friend Mirko, about whom none of the adults around her can give any news. She then retreats into her own imagination, which for her generation has been shaped by television: the father, who died a few years earlier, lives in her head as a clumsy warrior in a post-atomic desert imagined with Zerocalcare, while Mirko we know only through the Super 8 handycam tapes with which they had fun filming themselves. Between the two worlds there is a language missing, and it isn’t for lack of malice from anyone”
Below are the film’s trailer and poster.
Comments