24/08/2018 - A coming-of-age tale set in the world of hockey, the feature debut by the 34-year-old director is the Italian film supported by Biennale College Cinema this year

Gender identity, bullying, discrimination, sexuality and the search for one’s real self: these are the powerful but delicate topics at the heart of Zen in the Ice Rift, the feature debut by 34-year-old director Margherita Ferri, produced by Articolture and developed as part of the 2017/2018 edition of Biennale College Cinema, the Venice Biennale Foundation’s high-level training workshop for the production of micro-budget feature films.

The film, which will be presented as a world premiere on the Lido during the 75^th Venice Film Festival, is a coming-of-age tale starring two first-time actresses, Eleonora Conti and Susanna Acchiardi, and set in deepest small-town Italy, on the highly symbolic structure of a hockey pitch. Maia, better known as ZEN, is a troubled 16-year-old loner who lives in a small village in the Apennines in Emilia-Romagna. She is the only female member of the local hockey team, and her team mates never pass up the opportunity to bully her for being a tomboy.

When Vanessa – the intriguing and confused fiancée of one of the players in the team – runs away from home and takes refuge in Maia’s mother’s lodge, a bond is forged between the two girls, and for the first time, Maia manages to confide her doubts about her own identity in someone else. With both of them spurred on by a desire to break free from the roles that the tiny community has forced them to play, Maia and Vanessa thus embark on a journey in search of their own identity and sexuality, which are as fluid and restless as adolescence itself.

For the director, who was trained at UCLA in Los Angeles and subsequently at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Zen in the Ice Rift “portrays the discomfort and the struggles that must be overcome by people who do not conform to the gender roles and the heteronormativity imposed by our society”. Flanking the lead actresses, besides Fabrizia Sacchi (who we will also see at Venice among the cast of Suspiria [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]), is a group of teenagers selected from among the students at the “mountain” schools in the Metropolitan City of Bologna, following a workshop on the topics of discrimination and bullying, and the hockey players from the Fanano Sports Centre. “I’ve tried to tell Maia’s story by juxtaposing her emotions with the landscape of the Apennines in Emilia-Romagna, which are both beautiful and long-forgotten,” adds Ferri. “It’s a movie that’s deeply rooted in the LGBT+ community and in our national territory, but its ultimate aim is to accompany the audience down that universal path leading to self-discovery, during the angst-ridden years of adolescence.”

Zen in the Ice Rift will be distributed in Italy by Istituto Luce-Cinecittà.

(Translated from Italian)