Family games in rural Italy
Ten years after making his feature debut, Dio c’è, Alfredo Arciero is heading back to theatres with Family Game ( making of). Screened at the latest Festival di Villerupt, the film, a long time in the making for the director (who wrote the story and screenplay with Marina Polla De Luca), is set “in a rural area that is neutral and could be anywhere, and arose from the need to depict today’s Italy through a family microcosm”.
“They are a seemingly normal family,” says lead actress Sandra Ceccarelli, who plays the wife of Vittorio (Stefano Dionisi), a successful surgeon who cheats on her and is tormented by an unconfessable professional secret, and mother of Martina, an adolescent struggling with a still uncertain sexual orientation, and little Matteo, who is obsessed with virtual reality to the point of reconstructing his emotional life on his computer.
Their already precarious balance will be broken by Vittorio’s brother Andrea (Fabio Troiano), a recovering drug addict fresh out of a rehab centre.
Apparently, Dionisi’s role underwent numerous changes, “to highlight his feelings of guilt towards the other characters”: a betrayed wife, neglected children and a brother left to fend for himself.
The cast is rounded out by two actors known in Italy onscreen and, above all, on stage – Ugo Pagliai and Eros Pagni – while Elena Bourika (recently seen in Mimmo Calopresti’s The Feast [+see also:
trailer
film profile]) convincingly plays the (not too) much-younger-than-herself Martina.
Scored by Louis Siciliano, Family Game was produced two years ago by Videodrome Visual Productions, RAI Cinema, Iron Production, I.D.F. Italian Dream Factory and Gianfranco Morani. It will be distributed by Revolver on March 7 on at least five screens.
(Translated from Italian)
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