“He comes, he kills, he leaves. It’s not the first time; I know him.” It is in the Po Valley, the epicentre of the Padania state long fantasised about by Italy’s xenophobic far right - but also a place of employment for large numbers of immigrants, and a region rich in fauna and flora coexisting with intensive livestock farming and maize monoculture - that Tommaso Usberti has chosen to set his first feature, the singular Before the War, presented in the International Film Critics’ Week at the 83rd Venice Film Festival.

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The film is steeped in extremity, and opens with a violent and unsettling motorised hunting sequence, observed by a young boy, an autistic child “who can speak, but does not speak”, from his hiding place. It is a fitting introduction to this bold work by a young filmmaker who favours an exacerbated form of cinematic expressionism, stripping away excess dialogue and heavy-handed narrative signposting.

“I thought you were more delicate."
"I’m an animal."
"No, you’re like the others.”
All bulging muscles, hyper-macho like all his friends, quick to pick a fight and caught in a daily routine that takes him from the garage where he works as a mechanic to the nightclub where he lets loose on the dance floor, Guido (the charismatic Piero Usberti), in his early twenties, is somewhat thrown off balance by his encounter with Marika (Luàna Bajrami), a young Kosovar woman killing time in a country she does not like. A strange romance develops over the course of a few days, against a wider backdrop hardly conducive to relationships between different communities, while Guido, who is very familiar with firearms, is being pressured by those around him to accept the approaches of a mercenary recruiter…

Closely following in the wake of its protagonist, the film sketches an intense, elliptical portrait of a society shaped by a primitive sense of identity and of a disorientated younger generation clinging to archaic masculine codes that glorify strength. An air of a curse hangs over a story whose plot is deliberately minimalist – an unusual choice that may make the overall narrative feel slightly disjointed in places, but one that is fully embraced and entirely consistent with the director’s Pasolinian approach. The movie leaves ample room for sensations – particularly in two highly accomplished hunting sequences – as well as for music, ranging from contemporary sounds to Vivaldi, and for the filming of nature and its animals (deer, wild boar, herons and others). In doing so, it poses, without embellishment, a question that remains a universal individual dilemma, with inevitable political resonances: can one free oneself from conformist identification with the dominant group and from a dying culture of violence?

Before the War was produced by French outfit L’Heure d’été and Italian company Mir Cinematografica, and co-produced by Italy’s Eolo Film Production. The Party Film Sales is handling its international sales.