12/02/2025 - Antonio Pisu reunites with his trio of characters in Eastern Europe, this time after the fall of the Berlin wall, in a spy comedy that delicately balances lightness and reflection

Matteo Gatta, Jacopo Costantini and Lodo Guenzi in Tornando a Est

Pago, Rice and Bibi, second chapter. Five years after their trip to Romania, the three protagonists of Est [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Antonio Pisu
film profile] return to Eastern Europe for a new adventure on the road, between utopia and disillusionment. In the fiction, only two years have passed: we’ve gone from 1989 to 1991. The Berlin wall has fallen, it seems like the world has changed, and yet… Tornando a Est, directed, like its predecessor, by Antonio Pisu and in Italian cinemas from 13 February with Plaion Pictures, revisits the structure of that first film (three slightly naive friends catapulted in an unexpected reality and in situations that are bigger than they are), but adds a touch of action and suspense, over the background of a historical moment that has marked a generation.

Laughter and melancholy – it is on that subtle line that Pisu (who also wrote the screenplay) keeps the spectator, between one plot twist and another. We reunite with Pago, Rice and Bibi (the tried and tested trio of Matteo Gatta, Lodo Guenzi and Jacopo Costantini) in their Cesena and in their peaceful lives: Pago is a tour guide and dreams of opening a cinema, Rice works in a bank, and Bibi exchanges long love letters with a Bulgarian woman to whom, every once in a while, he also sends money. While they are cheering their local team at the stadium, they get an idea: why not go to Bulgaria to finally meet Yuliya, Bibi’s “girlfriend”? And so the three of them jump in their rickety car and head for Sofia.

Like the first film, the fiction is enriched by real footage from trips to the East taken over these years by the film’s producers, Maurizio Paganelli and Andrea Riceputi (the real Pago and Rice), even though this time around, the documentary element is less present. Instead, the spy story element prevails instead since, once they arrive in Sofia, the three men discover that beautiful Yuliya (Bulgarian actress Alexandra Vale) isn’t exactly who they throught she was and find themselves unwillingly involved in an international intrigue with Italian criminals, a fearsome Bulgarian gang, the secret services who follow their tracks (and, consequently, those of our protagonists) and a young woman in Sofia, who left for Italy with the hope of finding a dignified job and instead ends up working the streets.

“Stupidly, I thought that now that the wall has fallen, everything would change, the world, Europe, and maybe us, too”, Rice says in front of the empty shelves of a supermarket in the Bulgarian capital. The broken dream of a generation destined for precariousness is the bitter background of this dramedy that looks at the problems of Eastern European countries, before and after the Soviet regime, through the eyes of three boys from the Italian provinces and which, playing on misunderstandings, entertains and amuses, also thanks to the close-knit trio of protagonists (with Cesare Bocci and Zachary Baharov standing out in the cast). A second formative trip for Pago, Rice and Bibi that would deserve wider commercial success (the first chapter came out in the middle of the pandemic with all the difficulties that this entailed, but then won multiple awards in numerous international festivals), Tornando a Est is a generational comedy in which history intertwines with the personal and the past resonates with the present, and which delicately balances lightness and reflection.

Tornando a Est is produced by Stradedellest Produzioni with Rai Cinema.

(Translated from Italian)