04/12/2006

Having shelved the ambitious project on the extraordinary adventures of Lieutenant Guillet, young, Pugliese filmmaker Edoardo Winspeare has recently finished, together with Andrea Piva and Alessandro Valenti, the screenplay of his new film I galantuomini (lit. “The Gentlemen”), which takes its from one of Giovanni Verga’s rusticana novellas. Fabrizio Gifuni and Donatella Finocchiaro are set to star.

"Shooting will begin next year and 90 percent will take place in the Salento, the rest in Bari", the director told the local press. Fabrizio Mosca (Titti Film) will produce for RAI Cinema, with Tore Sansonetti (Sidecar).

After having changed settings from the Salento region to Taranto in his last film, The Miracle (presented at the 60th Venice Film Festival), in his new film Winspeare once agains returns to recount his land, as he had done in Sangue vivo (2000) and Pizzicata (1996), both award-winners that were distributed in Europe and the US.

"I look for form, the language, the faces, the music", said the director. "Substance is hidden behind form. Furthermore, in an increasingly similar world, I find it fascinating to explore differences. Having said that, even if my stage is limited from a horizontal point of view, it’s very ambitious vertically speaking, because the Salento and Puglia nevertheless become a metaphor for the ‘other’. Moreover, emotions are universal".

The film, which spans the 1970s-90s, is a love story between a judge and a woman whom life has led her to crime. "They are two people of different social classes", says Winspeare. "He belongs to the bourgeoisie, to the society of ‘gentlemen’, whereas she is a farmer’s daughter who becomes a ‘boss’. The theme is the law: written law and moral law. The film asks the question whether it is legitimate to love someone who has chosen to be on the side of ‘wrong’".

(Translated from Italian)