20/03/2026 - Davide Angiuli’s debut film explores integration by way of crime on the outskirts of Bari, with echoes of film noir but whose identity is strongly rooted in dialect and territory

Donato (Malich Cissé, an Apulian of Senegalese origin) is a twenty-year-old from Bari who was adopted and later abandoned, and who gets by on odd jobs while taking care of his grandmother who has Alzheimer’s (Lucia Zotti). One evening, thief on the run Agust (Giulio Beranek) forces Donato to hide him in his car. A smooth manoeuvre at a traffic light in order to hide from a police car, changes everything. Agust gifts him a gold necklace to reward his efforts, and when Donato loses his job in a pizzeria and needs money for his grandmother, he asks Agust to bring him in as a driver.

The influence of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive and Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver is clear from these opening sequences. But Davide Angiuli, who presented his debut feature film On Edge in the Italian Film Competition of BIF&ST, ahead of its release in Italian cinemas via Notorious Pictures on 26 March, transposes that narrative model to a radically different context. There’s no glamour or glossy aesthetic here: the Barese outskirts are claustrophobic, dirty and inescapable. Director of photography Emilio M. Costa films faces close-up and with a narrow focus, often silhouetted against natural light, blurring what’s around his protagonists. The effect is one of visual oppression which reflects the existential cage in which they’re living.

Albanian Agust initiates Donato into the crime world through insults and slaps. He does so out of friendship, not knowing other ways to connect. There’s a homoerotic subtext to Agust’s gestures, which never explodes but which permeates the relationship unfolding between the pair, a bond based upon physical and verbal violence. Their shared language is the Barese dialect, which is subtitled for non-Apulian viewers. This language becomes a meeting point, a means to integrate within a region which exploits them without even seeing them. Both are foreigners and invisible: the crime boss who commissions thefts and other offences from Agust turns to Donato, who’s black, and says "he’s Albanian like you", cancelling out his identity by reducing him to a single category of otherness.

Donato enters into Agust’s family, which is composed of Albanians who have fled their country and who live according to the Kanun - an ancient code of honour which the latter’s mother (Ema Andrea) follows to the letter. Agult’s little sister Erina (Romina De Giglio) wants to break free from that suffocating tradition and sees Donato as a possible means of escape. For a brief moment in time, Donato gets a taste of what it means to belong to a family.

The pace of the film is frenetic, thanks to Massimo Ruggiero’s rapid-fire cutting, and is accelerated by Carlo Giannico’s original tech house music. The dialogue is similarly hectic, heightening the dramatic tension in the story. Angiuli creates a spiral of violence which slowly closes in on his protagonists, who are all trapped in lives they haven’t chosen for themselves.

The film works because it stays true to the sociological reality of the region – the invisibility of immigrants, exploitation, dialect as an identity code – displaying a personal approach to film direction which is reminiscent of other recent European examples. The tension between integration and belonging, between biological family and chosen family, is resolved schematically, but with a level of complexity in line with the urgency of the story and the power of the two protagonists’ performances.

On Edge was produced by Movimento Film, Oz Film, Verdeoro and Notorious Pictures in collaboration with Rai Cinema. World sales are entrusted to Intramovies.

(Translated from Italian)