Nominated for Best International Feature
Q&A with Director Gianluca Santoni, hosted by Broadcaster and Film Critic, Ashanti Omkar
Ten years old Denni has a mission: to save his mother from his father’s violence. For this reason he devises an infallible plan: he will have him killed by someone who kills people for a living, a superkiller.
Among the rutted tracks, staved-in boats and never-to-be-finished blocks of flats on the coastline of northeastern Italy between Porto Corsini and Cesenatico, industrialist Fabio (Andrea Sartoretti) has been beating his wife Maria (Barbara Ronchi) for years and getting away with it.
Drifting into fantasies of power, their 10-year-old son Denni (Francesco Lombardo) settles on murder-for-hire as the answer to his family’s problems, and approaches Secco (Andrea Lattanzi), a kind-hearted petty thief and failed armed robber whom the local kids have built up in their minds as a ‘super-killer’.
An oddly charming battle of wits and wills between Secco and Denni ensues, with the former hoping to secure the cash for the hit job on Fabio without actually doing it, and the latter immediately suspecting this. Thanks to Secco’s beautiful, hostile ex-girlfriend Marta (Swamy Rotolo) – pregnant by him; her jealous new beau; and Secco’s violent jailbird brother, the adventure becomes by turns comical and terrifying.
Emotionally, the film’s high note occurs when Denni, accidentally high on MDMA, teaches Secco how to ‘swim’ on the bottom of an empty swimming pool, choked with weeds and bearing the English graffito ‘Welcome to Italy’.
A quirky yet powerful take on the meaning of fatherhood.
Review by Daniel MacCannell
Supported by the Italian Cultural Institute
Supported by Bellaria Film Festival
