18/03/2008

Two years after screening at the RomeFilmFest and (often-awarded) participation in numerous international festivals, Cover Boy by Carmine Amoroso is finally hitting Italian theatres.

The reasons for the delay, which ends March 21 when Istituto Luce will release it on 10 screens, were financial. “Many companies liked the film,” says its producer Giuliana Gamba, “but none wanted to take on the burden of releasing it without having distribution support from the Ministry of Culture”.

The director is polemical: with the Ministry, which “initially gave us €3m then reduced their funding by two-thirds, forcing us to rethink the film”; and with Italian cinema in general, which he calls the “land of privilege and nepotism”.

Thanks to the courage of Filand and Paco Cinematografica, the film was nonetheless made. “With cinematographer Paolo Ferrari we were pioneers in the use of HDV, and digital allowed us to lower costs. It’s a resource I recommend to all young filmmakers, because it truly is a way of democratising cinema”.

For Amoroso – who after his feature debut As You Want Me (“I was behind the debut of Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel as a film couple”) lived in Romania for two years – the film was initially meant to be a historical look at events of Timisoara, which led to the revolution against Ceausescu.

The low-budget film then took a turn towards the more intimate, an element nevertheless present in the original project, to focus on the relationship between two marginalised characters: Romanian immigrant Ioan (payed by dancer Eduard Gabia) and Italian temp worker Michele (Luca Lionello).

After a dramatic opening in 1989 Romania, the story shifts to the outskirts to Rome – “The same places where Rome, Open City was filmed,” says the director, who adds that “the film owes much to neorealism and the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini” – before moving to Milan, where Ioan becomes a model for an ad campaign skilfully orchestrated by photographer Chiara Caselli.

The actress says she is “proud to have contributed to a poetical work, which fought a lot to make it to theatres. Although in Italy cinema has always been a struggle”.

(Translated from Italian)