Just as Italy is choosing Familia [+lee también:
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In Andrea’s Island, Teresa Saponangelo and Vinicio Marchioni play Marta and Guido, a couple from Naples who are separating and who have an eight-year-old son called Andrea (newcomer  Andrea Migliucci), whom they’re fighting over to the point they need help from the juvenile court to decide how many days the child should spend with each of his parents.

The viewpoint favoured by Capuano in order to observe the world and explore topical social themes has always been that of adolescents and children. The Neapolitan director made his debut in 1991 with Vito e gli altri, which followed a boy who’d escaped his father’s massacre of their family. This was followed by movies such as Sacred Silence, revolving around a little boy forced by the mafia to denounce an anti-Camorra priest for paedophilia, Mario’s War, which foregrounded an encounter/clash between a difficult child taken away from his biological parents and his foster parents, and Dark Love [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], which focused on the rape of a sixteen-year-old girl by a group of her peers. In Andrea’s Island, the child – and the audience - is subjected to the traumatic experience of two parents at war, with the resulting mix of rootlessness, rebellion, guilty feelings and conflicted loyalties vis-à-vis his parents. Capuano explores the inner world of Andrea, who’s caught up in this battle, with very few, sober, essential sequences, revealing the protagonist’s attempts to find some sort of equilibrium in his pain. The titular island represents the marginalisation and segregation suffered by this child who, in the film’s epilogue, sings a song inspired by Peter Pan’s non-existent island, in full knowledge that there’s nowhere to take shelter.

The film unfolds on two levels. The main setting is the juvenile court, where the family members are interviewed by the judge and the psychologists, who must examine and assess the parents’ trustworthiness. The other is composed of flashbacks which provide a fragmented reconstruction of this marriage and which intersect with the answers given by Marta, Guido and Andrea in court, each of whom have their own version of events when it comes to the end of that loving relationship. Alongside Andrea’s growing discomfort, we become familiar with his parents’ personalities. Marta, played intensely by Saponangelo, has followed her dream of becoming an actress – we see her reciting lines by Goldoni on stage – without ever neglecting her motherly duties, and after years of marriage she’s attracted to another man. The son of an overbearing, famous musician father, Guido works in TV production and comes across as rational and cultured, but he accuses his wife of “not respecting discipline within their relationship”. His textbook, toxic masculinity is accompanied by one or two verbal tics, which hint at an increasingly obvious personality disorder which poses a risk of physical violence.

Capuano mainly chooses close- and very close-up shots to capture this vicious circle of human fragility, courtesy of director of photography Matteo Cocco, who circles the characters before looking over their shoulders and treats us to some pleasing visual effects, such as the wonderful blurring of a shot of Vinicio Marchioni/Andrea at a crucial point in the film.

Andrea’s Island was produced by Mosaicon Film, Eskimo, Indigo Film and Europictures in league with RAI Cinema, in collaboration with Mad Entertainment. True Colours are handling world sales.