21/06/2019 - The lucrative market of the third age is at the heart of the second work of fiction by the Veneto-based documentary-maker Alessandro Rossetto, who made his name with Small Homeland in 2014

After his excellent, full-length fiction debut in 2014 with Small Homeland [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], which was presented in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival, documentary-maker Alessandro Rossetto is back behind the camera once again and hard at work on his second movie Effetto domino [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alessandro Rossetto
film profile].

Currently in post-production, with Jacopo Quadri in charge of editing, the film is based on Padua-based writer Romolo Bugaro’s homonymous novel about a group of individuals involved in an enormous property investment in the very heart of the Italian North East. Once underway, a bank decides to pull the plug on the project and, as a result, constructions firms, consultants, suppliers and lorry drivers alike, who have all placed their trust in their respective clients, find themselves collapsing one after the other as the project is abandoned, creating the domino effect referenced in the title. In the book, the story revolves around the construction of a new town; the film, meanwhile, centres on the lucrative market of the third age and the transformation of 20 huge and abandoned hotels (which really exist in Abano, Montegrotto and Galzignano, in the Italian province of Padua) into homes for rich, elderly folk, allowing them to live out their final years in an exclusive, hi-tech environment.

"The novel also struck me for its structure, which inspired the screenplay that I wrote chapter by chapter with Caterina Serra", explained the director. “It was the perfect story for taking and experimenting with new narrative forms, different from those used in Small Homeland, even if there is a degree of continuity between the two films. The characters, for example, are of the same provenance: it was as if they’d evolved to become the protagonists of this new story”. Rossetto is also relying on many of the actors featuring in his first work: Diego Ribon and Mirko Artuso play the head builder and the surveyor of the building project respectively, Maria Roveran and Roberta Da Soller the daughters of the property entrepreneur, and Nicoletta Maragno his wife. Lucia Mascino will take on the key role of the director of the bank (in Bugaro’s book, it was a man).

Produced by Francesco Bonsembiante for Jolefilm with RAI Cinema, and benefitting from the support of IDM Südtirol – Alto Adige Film Fund & Commission, Effetto domino might be gunning for selection in an international festival such as Venice.

(Translated from Italian)