06/09/2020 - VENICE 2020: With his story of conflict between a father and son, Salvatore Mereu directs his most ambitious and complex film which brings out the best in its lead Gavino Ledda

A recurring word in a great number of Sardinian folk songs, “assandira” means “salutations to the sun” and is the title of Salvatore Mereu’s new work, selected to participate Out of Competition at the 2020 Venice Film Festival. Assandira [+see also:
trailer
interview: Salvatore Mereu
film profile] is based upon the novel of the same name by Giulio Angioni (published by Sellerio) who, as an anthropologist, was a keen observer of the island’s evolutions and involutions, and is considered to be a master of contemporary Sardinian fiction.

Shot in Foresta Burgos, in Barbagia, the film has the structure of a thriller, which brings to mind lofty models such as that behind Akira Kurosawa’s book Rashomon, as Mereu himself pointed out in an interview granted during the film shoot. Indeed, the story begins with an epilogue, following a fire which has devastated the agritourism farmhouse “Assandira” and whose ashes are now being cooled by torrential rain. It’s the end of the 1990s, and the fire has left one victim, Mario (Marco Zucca), the young man who manages the farm. The tale is told through the words of Mario’s father, the old shepherd Costantino, played by Gavino Ledda.

Costantino’s is a mumbling narration, a tense and pained inner monologue, verging on a Joycean stream of consciousness. It’s no coincidence that Giulio Angioni used a quote from Joyce’s Ulysses as an epigraph in his book: “God of heaven there’s nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about”.

“Assandira has returned to nothing, it’s stopped thriving”, Costantino painfully notes. “Water can’t wash away ills, or even shame”. In the long opening sequence, shot in the rain and in virtual darkness by expert cinematographer Sandro Chessa, we see the Carabinieri arrive along with the magistrate who will be leading the investigation, putting the very first questions to the young man’s father in an attempt to understand what’s taken place.

Going backwards in time, we discover that Mario - having returned home from Germany to where he’d previously emigrated - and his partner Greta (Anna Koenig, the pathologist in the TV crime series Dark) suggested to Mario’s father that he should get into agritourism and farm-stays for foreign tourists, “a stable business” which has already been tried and tested across Europe. All Costantino will have to do is play the part of an old-fashioned shepherd, delighting tourists who will pay him well for his efforts, allowing for the rectification of past actions. “We need to innovate with the old”, Greta declares.

In this instance, writer and poet Gavino Ledda, who played himself in the Taviani brothers’ adaptation of his autobiographical book Padre padrone (Cannes’ Palme d’Or winner in 1977), is embarking on a role reversal, from the latter work’s young shepherd and his redemption from a despotic head of family to the present film and its father who bends to his son’s will and accepts to embark on an entrepreneurial adventure, resulting in an exotic and primitive tourist attraction, betraying both the ancient identity of the land and a local culture built upon hard toil and sacrifice.

The success of the farm-stay business and its subsequent devastation by (intentional?) fire brings to light further contradictions between old and new; between a mindset that’s slipping away and a new way of understanding the world. But shame is now the feeling that overwhelms old Costantino, over and above the death of his son.

The author of powerful works such as Ballo a tre passi (Best Film at Venice’s Critics’ Week 2003), Sonetàula [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (in the 2008 Berlinale’s Panorama line-up) and Pretty Butterflies [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (Orizzonti, Venice 2013), this is Mereu’s most ambitious and complex film, bolstered by long sequence shots which lend greater authenticity to the story and its protagonist (editing comes courtesy of Paola Freddi).

Assandira was produced by Viacolvento - owned by the director and his wife Elisabetta Soddu - in league with RAI Cinema and with the support of the Sardinia Film Commission Foundation. International sales are in the hands of The Match Factory, while Lucky Red will distribute the film in Italy.

(Translated from Italian)