Country: Italy
Year: 1983
Duration: 96'
A group of drug addicts spends the day on the beaches of Ostia, trying
to get a dose any way they can. Begging, theft, hold-ups, prostitution.
Cesare and Michela decide to leave this nightmarish scene forever, after
Cesare had been on the point of killing the girl and then taking his own
life. But before they stop, they decide to allow themselves one last dose,
the prelude to a tragic destiny.
“Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, heavy drugs began to
take hold in Italy. The media and the newspapers started paying
attention to the phenomenon, usually using fairly sanctimonious filters
that often neglected the phenomenology of the substance itself and its
immediate effects (the pleasure). In this way, it seemed totally
unexplainable why people used these drugs. Since Guido Blumir and
I knew this world pretty well, we decided to make a fiction film about
the phenomenon, with the idea of showing just what the situation is
really like.”
Biography
film director
Claudio Caligari
(Arona, 1948 – Rome, 2015) debuted as a director with a series of documentaries about the youth subculture of the 1960s and ‘70s, including Droga che fare, which he co-directed with Daniele Segre, Alice e gli altri, a film about the decline of the 1977 movement, and La follia della rivoluzione, about protests at a psychoanalysts’ convention in 1976. In 1983 he shot his first feature fiction film, Amore tossico, which won the Vittorio De Sica award at the Venice Film Festival, the Special Selection Award at the Festival of Valencia and Best Actress award at the San Sebastian Film Festival. After a fifteen-year hiatus, he returned to the big sreen in 1998 with The Scent of the Night, starring Valerio Mastandrea, which was presented out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. In 2015, few months after his death, his last film Non essere cattivo premiered out of competition at Venice Film Festival.
FILMOGRAFIA
Droga che fare (coregia/codirector Daniele Segre, doc., 1976), Alice e gli altri (doc., 1977), Lotte nel Belice (doc., 1977), La parte bassa (doc., 1978), La follia della rivoluzione (doc., 1978), Amore tossico (1983), L’odore della notte (1998), Non essere cattivo (2015).
Cast
& Credits
regia/director Claudio Caligari
soggetto, sceneggiatura/story, screenplay Guido Blumir, Claudio Caligari
fotografia/cinematography Dario Di Palma
montaggio/film editing Enzo Miniconi
scenografia, costumi/production design, costume design Lia Francesca Morandini, Maurizio Santarelli
musica/music Mariano Detto
suono/sound Roberto Alberghini
interpreti/cast
Cesare Ferretti, Michela Mioni, Enzo Di Benedetto, Roberto Stani, Loredana Ferrara,
Fernando Arcangeli, Mario Caiazzi, Gianni Schettini
produzione/production Iter International
soggetto, sceneggiatura/story, screenplay Guido Blumir, Claudio Caligari
fotografia/cinematography Dario Di Palma
montaggio/film editing Enzo Miniconi
scenografia, costumi/production design, costume design Lia Francesca Morandini, Maurizio Santarelli
musica/music Mariano Detto
suono/sound Roberto Alberghini
interpreti/cast
Cesare Ferretti, Michela Mioni, Enzo Di Benedetto, Roberto Stani, Loredana Ferrara,
Fernando Arcangeli, Mario Caiazzi, Gianni Schettini
produzione/production Iter International