25/03/2008

Andres, the ghost-writer of a politician running for election, disappears one rainy night. Thus begins Andres and Me [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Andrea Adriatico’s second film (four years after The Wind in the Evening), a mystery that intentionally focuses less on suspense that on delving into the identity crisis of a man who for a living writes words and speeches in which he does not believe.

The film takes an atypical approach to politics and, according to the director, “does not depict the right or the left, but the growing unease of a society that no longer sees itself reflected in the protagonists of public life”.

As in Adriatico's The Wind in the Evening, “in Andres and Me the political and the private intertwine,” says Stefano Casi, who co-wrote the screenplay with the director and writer Marco Mancassola.

Inspired in part by real life (Adriatico worked as a ghost-writer), the film is set in the Emilia region inundated by incessant rains, which serve, says Adriatico, as the “story’s acoustic background and above all as the symbol of the main character’s need for inner purity”.

“We entered a different, nocturnal dimension,” says Francesca d’Aloja, who plays Andres’ wife. The actress, soon debuting as a feature filmmaker with Il sogno cattivo (an adaptation of her eponymous novel), followed Adriatico’s sensibility without researching the character too much, fascinated as she was by “the anti-realism of the screenplay, which deformed reality”.

The actress is flanked by Massimo Poggio in an usual cast that features cameos by Corso Salani and Eva Robin's alongside director Tonino Valerii and Milena Vukotic, who, says the director, “had to do a nine-minute single take, shot under very difficult conditions”.

Produced by Monica Micoli for Cinemare, and presented at the latest London Film Festival, Andres and Me is being released in Italy by Vitagraph on April 5, at the height of the electoral campaign.

(Translated from Italian)