Noi 4: a chaotic and modern family
- After Scialla!, Francesco Bruni returns to explore family ties. From March 20 in cinemas, starring Ksenia Rappoport and Fabrizio Gifuni
It is early morning and Lara, Ettore, Emma and Giacomo all wake up in a different place. Lara in her bed, Ettore on a friend’s sofa, Emma in an occupied theatre and Ettore at his aunt’s home. It might not seem like it, but this was once a happy, now slightly torn apart, family. And what we are about to bear witness to is one of their days: frenetic, complicated, ordinary but special. After exploring the father-son relationship in his debut film Scialla! [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (Controcampo award in 2011 in Venice and David di Donatello 2012 award for best new-coming director), Francesco Bruni returns to exploring family ties in Noi 4 [+see also:
trailer
film profile], presented yesterday in Rome and coming to movie theatres next Thursday.
“My stories are inspired by people around me,” Bruni explains about his second piece of work as a director, who has been writing screenplays for a while (a faithful Paolo Virzì collaborator, among others). For his latest endeavour, the director looked inside his own home.
“The film was born from a reflection, somewhat problematic and painful, about what had happened a couple of years ago at the heart of my own family. Children were growing up, my role was no longer central, the old harmony was no longer there.”
The result is a sincere film, which alternates between humour and melancholy, in which audiences with teenage children will be able to identify. “I didn’t see this kind of family being represented in our cinema: middle-class, progressive, urban. And I wanted to tell that story.” The director says he wanted to choose “actors who weren’t too famous, whose faces would not overwhelm the characters they were playing, so that the family would actually seem real, normal and modern.”
The mother is played by Ksenia Rappoport (Coppa Volpi in 2009 in Venice for her role in La doppia ora [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Giuseppe Capotondi
film profile] by Giuseppe Capotondi), father by Fabrizio Gifuni (Romanzo di una strage [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], Il capitale umano [+see also:
trailer
interview: Paolo Virzì
film profile]). The two have been separated for years but have two children, Lucrezia Guidone, in her very early twenties and Francesco Bracci Testasecca, who is 13. Over the course of the day, when the youngest household member has a big test to take – they will be on the phone, bump into each other in the backdrop of a beautiful and chaotic Rome, immersed in traffic, in the sounds of the city, up until the moment when they will all four find themselves together for the first time in years.
“All characters show different sides of themselves depending on who is in front of them,” Bruni says. “They are like four superheroes who bring something special to life when all four of them are together. The proof that love survives whatever is thrown our way.” In a family more than anywhere else.
Produced by IBC Movie with Rai Cinema, under the executive production of Rita Rognoni for Pupkin Movie, Noi 4 will be coming out in movie theatres on March 20, distributed by 01 Distribution.
(Translated from Italian)
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