03/04/2009

Sbirri [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (“Cops”) is an unusual and rather courageous project, especially for a major distributor such as Medusa Film, made by television director Roberto Burchielli with star and producer Raoul Bova.

Their film, in national premiere at the Lecce European Film Festival (March 31-April 5), in fact was intended for the small screen. Shot with a hand-held digital camera, using long sequences and above all a difficult mix of fiction and reality, Medusa has since then decided to release it theatrically, on 200 screens on April 10.

The film centres on a group of undercover police officers who fight drug dealers and whose lives are interwoven with the private and professional life of journalist Matteo Gatti (Bova). Gatti’s 16-year-old son died taking a bad pill in a disco and through this work he tries to understand how it happened.

The film’s originality lies in its blend of fiction, like the main character’s family scenes, and actual police activity. “Everything that you see onscreen was experienced firsthand, from the police actions to the interrogations”, said Burchielli. “We were able to use that because we erased the faces of the people involved, to protect their privacy and also because not seeing their faces has a greater impact. It is as if drugs erased them”.

This stylistic mix, however, works against the fiction, which seems overly constructed, even though the director and actors (including Simonetta Solder, Luca Angeletti and the young Alessandro Sperduti) say that there was no script.