Cinema Italian Style: Misericordia
November 12, 2024
Three Italian sex workers care for a vulnerable man in Emma Dante’s allegorical third feature, exploring the theme of motherhood, and creating a poignant homage to women and to their capacity for love and resilience.
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In a small Sicilian seaside village surrounded by stone huts and waste, Arturo grows up in poverty and violence. His mother dies giving birth to him. Raised by prostitutes Betta, Nuccia, and Anna, who cared for him like their own, Arturo has a unique way of seeing the world due to a birth defect. At 18, he faces the challenges of Contrada Tuono, where everyone fights for survival, but his pure and different gaze brings hope. Based on her own stage play, director Emma Dante is a densely allegorical and furiously feminist work. It’s an unflinching, uncomfortable watch, a film that, with its hard-edged compassion and affinity with society’s discarded and rejected souls, has a kinship with the work of Pasolini.
- Director: Emma Dante
- Principal Cast: Simone Zambelli, Simona Malato, Tiziana Cuticchio, Milena Catalano, Fabrizio Ferracane
- Country: Italy
- Year: 2023
- Running Time: 95 min.
- Producer: Marica Stocchi
- Screenplay: Emma Dante, Elena Stancanelli, Giorgio Vasta
- Cinematographers: Clarissa Cappellani
- Editors: Benni Atria
- Music: Gianluca Porcu
- Awards: Black Nights Film Festival 2023 (Grand Jury Prize: Best Film, Best Actor)
- Filmography: The Macaluso Sisters (2020), A Street in Palermo (2013)
- Language: Italian
- International Sales: Charades