Starring: Giuseppe Cristiano, Mattia Di Pierro, Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, Dino Abbrescia
Director: Gabriele Salvatores
Category: IIB (Italian)
It's taken a while for this excellent Italian drama to come our way - having first appeared at the 2003 Berlin film festival - but the wait has certainly been worthwhile. It's the kind of gentle, engrossing film you hope local filmmakers might produce every now and again - if only they took the chance.
Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) is a boy from a poor farming family doing what most farm kids do - playing with his mates in the fields and generally finding ways to pass the time. But one day he stumbles on a boy (Mattia Di Pierro) chained up in a hole in the ground and slowly but surely the incident turns his world upside down.
Director Gabriele Salvatores lets his cameras linger on the small things in country life that matter - the rolling fields, the small reminders that death is never far away.
Taking a leaf out of the likes of Charles Laughton's superb Night of the Hunter (1955) in flashing glimpses of nature's brutality set against the innocence of youth, the film is touched with a savage sense of foreboding. So that, even when the kids are harmlessly at play, you know that something, somewhere, isn't quite right.