HBO Max has released the teaser trailer for Melania Rea, its new Italian original series focused on the terrible crime that tragically involved the eponymous 28-year-old woman from Campania, murdered in April 2011. The crime drama, directed by Stefano Mordini (The Invisible Witness) and starring Maria Esposito in the role of Melania and Daniele Rienzo as Salvatore Parolisi, her husband, will premiere at the Rome Film Festival (October 13–25) in the Freestyle | Series section, ahead of its upcoming streaming service release.
Melania Rea: The True Story Behind the TV Series
On April 20, 2011, Melania Rea’s body was discovered in a forest in Ripe di Civitella, within the Abruzzo National Park, not far from where she lived with her husband, the Army’s staff sergeant Salvatore Parolisi, and their 18-month-old daughter Vittoria. It marks the start of one of the most publicized and controversial investigations in recent years, a case that left a mark on Italian judicial history, helping to bring to the center of public debate the issue of gender-based violence and the concept of “femicide”.
Interweaving past and present, the series retraces the life of the young woman and the events surrounding her tragic end. The narrative begins with Melania’s disappearance report, filed by her husband after she apparently wandered off during a trip with him and their daughter to the Pianoro di Colle San Marco. More than the chronicle of a judicial case, Melania Rea tells the story of a young woman, her desires, her aspirations, and a relationship that, beneath an outward normality, gradually reveals dynamics of possession, control, and domination, until the reconstruction of the judicial truth.
The series was produced with the collaboration of the Rea family — Melania’s parents and her brother Michele — and through engagement with some of the key figures in the case, including the Rea family lawyer, the criminologist and consultant Margherita Carlini, the investigators and the journalists who followed the case, who granted exclusive access to facts, anecdotes and direct testimonies, as well as verified documentary sources: from public verdicts to court documents, from investigative records to the evidence presented at trials, up to expert reports. Somma Vesuviana and the province of Ascoli provide the backdrop for the reconstruction of the events with a narrative structure that alternates real people with others freely inspired by individuals actually involved. In the cast also Michela Cescon in the role of Prosecutor Gabriella Rocci, Carmen Pommella and Antonio Buonanno as the parents Vittoria Garofalo and Gennaro Rea, Francesco Rungi as Melania’s brother Michele Rea and Giulia Ercolini as the friend Nunzia.
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