Two important guests at “Cinema intorno al Vesuvio”: Marcello Fonte, Palme d’Or at Cannes for best actor, will be a guest on July 4th at 21.15:XNUMX pm to present Dogman by Matteo Garrone and the director Laurent Cantet presents his “L’atelier” for the first time in Campania. The film festival is curated by Arci Movie and is held at Villa Bruno in San Giorgio a Cremano. The evenings with guests are curated by Antonella Di Nocera and Roberto D'Avascio.
“Dogman” by Matteo Garrone, loosely based on a crime story that happened thirty years ago, tells the dark and violent story of Marcello (Marcello Fonte). His existence always flows the same and indifferent between the folds of a suburb suspended between the big city and uncontaminated nature. A gentle and quiet person, Marcello runs a dog grooming salon. During his days he has to juggle work, his beloved daughter, Sofia, and the ambiguous relationship of subservience with Simoncino (Edoardo Pesce), a former boxer recently released from prison and feared by the entire neighborhood for his behavior bordering on madness. Continuously bullied and abused, now exhausted by a life of humiliation, Marcello decides to follow in Simoncino's footsteps and become his assistant in a series of robberies that upset the town in which they live. Now at the mercy of Simoncino's charisma and bound by loyalty to him as an old friend, Marcello ends up betraying not only his own morality, but also his fellow villagers. The weight of his actions becomes increasingly unbearable, so much so that he ends up accusing himself, ending up in prison for a year, far from the daughter he was supposed to take care of. After losing everything and everyone, Marcello finally comes to his senses, along with an unstoppable thirst for revenge...
Mine is absolutely not a film about torture – says Garrone – Those looking for this splatter aspect, based on the news story from which the film draws inspiration, will be disappointed. I think it is right to communicate the film, at the risk of losing viewers. It is not a violent film, Dogman is a film in line with my previous ones, focused more on the psychological excavation of the characters”.
On Friday 6 July at 21.15:XNUMX pm, director Laurent Cantet, winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes for “La classe”, will be a guest at “Cinema intorno al Vesuvio”, the film festival organised by Arci Movie at Villa Bruno for the first time in Campania, where he will present his “L'atelier”; the director will be joined by Consul General Jean-Paul Seytre, introduced by Antonella Di Nocera.
Ten years after winning the Palme d'Or for the extraordinary “The Class”, Laurent Cantet returns to tell the story of today's political and generational conflicts with a highly original thriller, “L'Atelier”, written with Robin Campillo (“BPM”), which was successfully received at the last Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section.
The film's protagonist is Olivia Dejazet, an established crime writer who has to hold a writing workshop in La Ciotat, a city in the south of France once known for its shipyards but now in the midst of an economic crisis. Among her young students, Antoine stands out, an introverted and talented boy, often at odds with the others on political issues due to his racist and aggressive positions. Antoine's attitude becomes increasingly violent as the days go by and Olivia seems to be scared and attracted by him at the same time, until the situation dramatically gets out of hand for both of them...
“The film is set in La Ciotat,” says Laurent Cantet, “a city that at the end of the 80s experienced a great season of workers’ struggles after the closure of the shipyards. Our aim was to bear witness to the radical transformation of a society that, probably due to the political and economic crisis, no longer has any relationship with that world of the past – a world that the older generations would like not to disappear. What the young participants in the writing workshop say is that they do not want to take on that past, which does not belong to them in any way. Today, in fact, they have to deal with a series of completely different problems: finding their place in a world that holds them in low regard, the feeling of having no control over things and much less over their own lives. But, above all, they are forced to deal with a violent society torn apart by terrible political and social issues, such as economic instability, terrorism or the rise of the far right. The cast is mostly made up of young newcomers, selected through open castings in bars, gyms, theaters, and schools. Among them, Matthieu Lucci, who plays Antoine, was truly an incredible discovery. One day he confessed to me how much he hated what his character did and how much it made him suffer to play him, but on set he was always open to tackling the most difficult things I asked of him. He has the ability to attack and confront five or six people with such conviction that, after a scene, he had to go and apologize to those who didn't know him yet, explaining that it was just his character!”
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