27/02/2006

A children’s war takes on many forms. The war of boy soldiers in Asia, Africa and South America is made up of gunpowder and blood, a stolen childhood that cries out for toys that can help the child can reclaim his own innocence. That of Mario, a troubled boy in a marginalized and working class Naples, is made up of family violence and the desire for freedom.

"I don’t know which war is more desperate," says the film’s director, Antonio Capuano, provocatively, "that of a boy with a machine gun in his hand or that of another boy in a system of loneliness, of nights passed wide awake in an orphanage. An institution is violence, the small soldiers are sent to kill, the others fight in the trenches. I think I may prefer the war waged with a machine gun in hand".

Cineuropa met with the Neapolitan director for the release of his sixth film, Mario’s War. (La guerra di Mario), which will be distributed by Medusa on March 3 on 50 screens.

The nine year-old main character is taken away from his mother and placed in the care of a well-off Neapolitan couple. The woman is completely taken with Mario, who fulfils her frustrated need for motherhood, while her husband, on the other hand, distances himself from the boy. Mario becomes confused, torn between two worlds: the concrete of his own neighbourhood and the house with a view of the sea of his new family. "I was interested in bringing the real experience a friend of mine went through to the big screen, and the sensations, emotions and fears over it that she conveyed to me", said Capuano.

Once again playing a mother, after an unforgettable performance in Respiro (Grazia’s Island) [+see also:
trailer
film profile] , in this film Valeria Golino is an art teacher familiar with beauty and colour who finds herself at the centre of a encounter/clash between two different social classes in a Naples that was realistically captured by DoP Luca Bigazzi. "I had a very moving relationship with the boy, Marco Grieco, both in the film and on the set", said Golino.

Produced by Domenico Procacci’s Fandango and Nicola Giuliano’s Indigo Film, Mario’s War had a budget of just over €1m yet Procacci points out that this "does not at all make it a small film, but a big film non made on a small budget".

(Translated from Italian)