30/04/2014 - Alessandro Lunardelli’s debut piece is a road movie starring two brothers on the discovery of two worlds. A Pupkin-Rai Cinema production now in movie theatres

“If you change your life maybe someone else will want to change theirs too,” is what 18-year-old Davide, the main character in Up to the World [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is told. And a long journey to the other side of the world, made up of new and stimulating encounters and breath-taking landscapes is of huge help too. He starts in an imagined small village in Piedmont and travels to the glaciers of Patagonia, passing through Barcelona and Chile’s Santiago. The directing debut by Alessandro Lunardelli, presented last November at the Rome Festival in the Alice in the City section is now hitting Italian movie theatres.

For Davide (Filippo Scicchitano, recently seen in Fasten Your Seatbelts [+see also:
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interview: Ferzan Ozpetek
film profile] by Ferzan Ozpetek), provincial life and work in his father’s company is stifling, to the extent that he keeps his homosexuality hidden. This is nothing like what his brother is going through. Loris (Luca Marinelli, the disturbed boy who paints himself red in The Great Beauty [+see also:
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interview: Paolo Sorrentino
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film profile] by Alicia Scherson), on the road towards the Patagonia glaciers, which are under threat.

The main characters’ naturalness and the absolute credibility of the brotherly tie – with its dynamics, snide comments and secrets – are what makes the film, together with the insight into faraway realities, the idealism of youth and the beautiful landscapes. Despite the title, Lunardelli (who wrote the screenplay with Vanessa Picciarelli) does not dig deep into many of the themes he raises, preferring to give his characters colour (Loris only speaks about his favourite team on his travel log as a nod to his vacuity). This ends up giving liveliness to the road movie, which is not so much about adventure as it is about the contrast between a younger unsettled, instinctive brother escaping, and an older, slightly miserly brother who follows him to get him back on track. 

Produced by Rita Rognoni for Pupkin, Rai Cinema and Chilean La Ventura with contribution and support from the Turin Piedmont Film Commission, Up to the World came out this 30 April in 40 cinemas with Microcinema. International sales is being taken care of by Media Luna New Films. 

(Translated from Italian)