CICCIOLINA POCKET

The early 1990s. Three adolescents are trying to seem older than they are: they build tree houses and challenge each other continuously. They collect trading cards but the most coveted collection features photos of semi-naked women ripped from magazines, the most desired prize for winning a game. Other picture magazines tickle their desire to become adults: will the newspaper-seller notice how old they are? Who will be the one to deal with him? And will adulthood be as fascinating as it seems in their imagination?

“Cicciolina Pocket is a snapshot of adolescence between the late 1980s and the early '90s, a direct drive of the lives of four boys, harsh and brutal, temperamental and imaginative. An avalanche of quips that frames one afternoon that has one single goal, a single unrepeatable adventure: the search for the first erotic magazine, the object of their desire, their 'first time.' Movies like Stand by Me and Goonies played a central role in my imagination and in how I recount adolescence in films. Using these reference points, but without much nostalgia, we constructed the movie, setting it along the Po river in Emilia, a place full of the cinema of the past – from Bertolucci to Olmi – where time is still standing still and it's still possible to set an adventure like this one, the ideal place to build a tree house and let the imagination of our four protagonists travel toward the otherness, toward this opposite sex, made of the same flesh but yet so mysterious, so exciting but also so distant.”

DIRECTOR: Claudio Casazza. SCREENPLAY: Roberto Donati. CINEMATOGRAPHY: Michele Cherchi Palmieri. FILM EDITING: Ubaldo Giusti. CAST: Giovanni Versari, Luca Cagnetta, Samuele Marchi, Tommaso Finocchiaro, Giuseppe Sepe. PRODUCERS: Carla Vulpiani, Ubaldo Giusti. PRODUCTION: Ubaldo Giusti’s Keep Digging Production, Quasar.