Berlinguer. The Great Ambition.

Andrea Segre, director of this intense and gentle film, entrusted the scenography to Alessandro Vannucci, already nominated for best scenography for Il sol dell’avvenire by Nanni Moretti at the Nastri d’argento in 2023. And this time too his work deserves attention.

If Segre’s aim was to create an immersive direction, as he writes in the notes, following Elio Germano/Enrico Berlinguer «thanks to the mastery of Benoît Dervaux’s camera, inside the places and choices of those very dense years, true watersheds of the social and political development of Italy and beyond», Vannucci’s work takes us philologically inside the intimate spaces, in the house where Berlinguer lived with his wife and children, his studio, the party headquarters, but also in the factories, the Unity celebrations, Russia, Bulgaria, and his Sardinia.

We are in the 70s, precisely between 1973 and 78, even if the film ends with Berlinguer’s funeral.

Those years are reconstructed with extreme fidelity, to also dialogue with some images from the film archives used «not to bear witness, but to sculpt», as Segre underlines, as «precise signs of a memory that becomes cinema». Last but not least, the music: composed by Iosonouncane, it is the perfect language to lead the audience on this journey. Temporal, political, social, philosophical.

Vermiglio.

This film is a dream, that is, it was born from the dream of the director Maura Delpero, who says: «My father left us on a hot summer afternoon. (…) In the months that followed he came to visit me in a dream.

He had returned to his childhood home, in Vermiglio. He was six years old and had two legs like a mountain goat, he smiled at me toothlessly, he carried this film under his arm: four seasons in the life of his large family.

A story of children and adults, between deaths and births, disappointments and rebirths, of their holding each other close in the curves of life, and from communities becoming individuals. A story of high altitude, with its walls of snow. Of the smell of wood and hot milk on frozen mornings. (…) A story of war without bombs, or great battles. In the iron logic of the mountain that every day reminds man how small he is». And the film he shot, awarded the Silver Lion in Venice, is exactly this.

The set design is dry, precise and high-altitude like the plot: you live in an old mountain house, clean, essential, with beds shared between brothers and a kitchen inhabited by women, the father-teacher's study and life outside, in those four seasons that transform the fields and woods around the village.

Every scenographic detail is made essential by Pirra to the gaze, as if it were a letter of Delpero's personal alphabet, who describes his film as follows: «Vermiglio is a landscape of the soul, a “Family Lexicon” that lives inside me, on the threshold of the unconscious, an act of love for my father, his family and their small village».

Until the end.

Gabriele Muccino in his thirteenth film tells the story of Sophie, an American girl who during a vacation in Palermo discovers a way of living life that she had never imagined and wants to live it to the fullest, walking on the edgebetween life and death, in a dizzying attraction for danger.

«In an era in which experiences are increasingly mediated by a screen, we are crashing against the evident, profound and vital need to live fully, involving body and mind to explore the limits and push ourselves beyond. (…) In Braveheart, there is a famous phrase that goes: "Every man dies, not every man really lives" (Every man dies, not every man really lives), and it sums up the guiding spirit that moves the character of Sophie», explains the director.

Which then continues: «Fino alla Fine does not want to be simply seen, but lived, because it deals with what our lives have a silent and constant need: the drive to overcome barriers, to not settle for a prepackaged and programmed existence. (…) This film is a hymn to freedom, even at the cost of life itself».

The film was shot in two languages to underline the contrast and dialogue between two worlds that meet and where action and adrenaline intertwine with the feelings of the characters.

Massimiliano Sturiale, best scenography at the 2022 Nastri d'Argento for the film Freaks Out, contributes significantly to creating the visual shock between the postcard Palermo, idealized by American tourism, and the night-time one, where the real crime story of this film develops.
Parthenope. Paolo Sorrentino's latest film, Parthenope takes the viewer to immerse themselves in the waters of Posillipo and the history of Naples. Different time planes tell the story of a woman who embodies the figure of the siren who gave birth to the city. Over a time span from 1950 to 2023, it speaks of freedom, of the mystery of femininity in a life story where the fascination for beauty and the love for art interact in Paolo Sorrentino's Naples. Which follows the protagonist throughout her life, from her birth in 1950, through her youth and that perfect summer of an aimless escape to Capri, with the pleasure only of living it. And then, the life that happens before the eyes of the public who find themselves narrated in a complex and beautiful city and in the particular and universal events of the protagonist. The film is a project about seeing, in its difference from looking, a seeing of life that the set designer Carmine Guarino sets up on a beauty-proof set. A Neapolitan beauty, described and narrated with meticulous accuracy.