27/02/2008

“I have helped many young and talented filmmakers debut, but they’re a cut above the rest, they’re among the most talented in Italy,” says producer Amedeo Pagani, currently wrapping up Theo Angelopoulos’ upcoming The Dust of Time, of Davide Barletti and Lorenzo Conte.

The two are making their feature debut with Fine pena mai (which loosely translates to “Life Sentence”), after numerous shorts, documentaries and the docu-fiction Italian Sud Est, all made with the other two members of the Fluid Video Crew collective.

Based on Antonio Perrone’s autobiographical novel Vista d’interni (written in prison, where he is serving a sentence for Mafia ties, drug trafficking and murder), the film reconstructs – through flashbacks and flash forwards (edited by Roberto Missiroli and Paolo Petrucci) – the life of a criminal in Salento in the 1980s, and the “paradise lost” (as the film’s subtitle states) of a man who renounces a stable, middle-class life to sink into an inferno of heroin, underground gambling dens and organised crime.

Made with support from the Apulia Film Commission and shot in the same places as Italian Sud Est, the new film turns the prospective of the latter on its head. “Previously, we showed a wonderful, dream-like, pacific land,” says the directors, “and we wanted to complete this portrait with its dark, repressed side”. To do so, “we needed a book that reflected up the changes of that society from a personal yet detached point of view”.

Perrone’s wife is played by Valentina Cervi – who claims to have “modelled my own voice after hers, from listening to her interviews” – the film used many local actors, who also worked as dialogue coaches for the regional dialect. There was a feeling “of great creative freedom,” says star Claudio Santamaria, “and each of us could contribute to the film’s creation”.

Co-produced by Pagani’s Classic with Verdeoro and France’s Paradis Film, with a contribution from the EC’s Eurimages Fund and riconoscimento d’Interesse Culturale Nazionale del MiBAC, Fine pena mai is being released in Italy on February 29 by Mikado on 40 screens.

(Translated from Italian)