Feature Narrative Competition | France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland | French, Italian, with Arabic subtitles | 92 min
In her directorial debut, Annarita Zambrano gives us a smart affecting account of how a former Italian terrorist stripped of his safe haven status in France, plans to escape Europe with his school-going teenage daughter. The film is a powerful look at how the
violence of political resistance takes a toll on the lives of men.
In 2002, France did away with the Mitterrand policy of allowing convicted terrorists from Italy to remain in France without the fear of extradition. That year, a Bologna jurist, Marco Biagi, was assassinated. Zambrano uses these two incidents to weave a fictional
story of Marco Lamberti – who had been a member of the Armed Formation for the Revolution and who had fled from Italy to France in 1981 after killing a judge. Afraid that he would be deported, Lamberti and his daughter, Viola, seek the help of an old friend for passports which will help them travel to Nicaragua.
Zambrano’s sympathies lie not with Lamberti, and she skillfully states that such terror crimes, whatever be their motivation, insidiously affect and even harm the present. Viola is upset that she has been dragged out of a great life at school and is going to be taken to Central America. But she gets even more angry and confused when she sees a newspaper heading on her father, “Intellectual or Criminal?” And we begin to understand that Lamberti's arguments – which he spells out in an interview with a journalist – are a fundamentally flawed rationale.
Annarita Zambrano was born in Rome and now lives in Paris. She has directed several short films which that were invited to the festival in Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals. In 2013, she directed The Black Soul of the Leopard, a documentary which analyzed Luchino Visconti’s masterpiece with a political dimension. After the war is Zambrano’s first feature film. It premiered at the 2017 Cannes in the prestigious Un Certain Regard section.
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