Country: Italy
Year: 2023
Duration: 18'
Angelo is 15 years old and lives in a small village in Sardinia in the early post-WWI period. He is very shy, and he is teased because of the disability of his elder brother, Agostino. He cannot defend himself and he would like to show more self-confidence, like his best friend, the charismatic Bastiano. Life flows in an apparent rural stillness, but the arrival of the Fascist Blackshirts disrupts the peace of the small community. While the villagers celebrate in the square in front of a big bonfire, Angelo can no longer hesitate and must decide which side he is on.
Biography
film director
Alberto Diana
(Iglesias, Sardinia, Italy, 1989) attended a Master’s degree in Creative documentary at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, after graduating in humanities from the University of Cagliari. His previous short documentary films have been screened in several international film festivals. In 2019 his feature documentary Fango rosso was selected in competition at the 37th edition of Torino Film Festival. He is developing the script for his first feature film Intra Montes. Frarìa is his first short fiction film.
FILMOGRAFIA
Barcelona en dos colors (doc, cm, 2011), La concorrente (doc, mm, 2016), La famiglia, la patria (doc, cm, 2017), Fango rosso (doc, mm, 2019), Pneuma (doc, cm, 2021), Carta urgente para Colombia (doc, cm, 2022), Frarìa (cm, 2023).
Declaration
film director
“Frarìa (spark) is a coming of age, in which a young man confronts his own identity in front of his community: rural Sardinia, a seemingly still place, in which, however, the profound social and political changes that would lead to fascism in the early postwar period were foreshadowed in the daily life. Angelo feels the pressure of the violence against his elder brother: facing the indifference of the villagers, who become accomplices of the arrogance of the Blackshirts, it is more crucial than ever to take sides. But how is it possible to react, when the whole world seems to be turned against you? How do you overcome your fear? […] The film is loosely based on some of my grandfather's childhood stories that took place in the 1920s, but it is a universal narrative: it is my story as a boy growing up in a small town, but also that of everyone who, regardless of geographic origin and age, has at least once felt crushed in their own town, their own neighborhood, and who, in order to grow up, had to learn to say no.”
Cast
& Credits
DIRECTOR, SCREENPLAY: Alberto Diana. CINEMATOGRAPHY: Francesco Piras. EDITING: Davide Orrù. PRODUCTION DESIGN: Luca Noce. COSTUMES: Stefania Grilli. SOUND: Roberto Cois. CAST: Leonardo Schirò, Pietro Burrai, Davide Grillo, Daniela Vitellaro, Andrea Melis, Daniele Podda, Pierluigi Cabras. PRODUCTION: Slingshot Films (Manuela Buono), Istituto Superiore Regionale Etnografico della Sardegna, con il contributo della Fondazione Sardegna Film Commission.
CONTACT: Slingshot Films info@slingshotfilms.it
