Bondi follows two women to the Black Sea

by Gabriele Barcaro

02/04/2008 - Kicking off it’s five-week shoot in Florence just days ago, Federico Bondi’s debut feature Mar nero (“Black Sea”, working title) will then move to the city of Sulina, on the Danube Delta. Following Carmine Amoroso’s Cover Boy and the upcoming Il clown e i ragazzi dal naso rosso (“The Clown and the Red-Nosed Kids”) by Marco Pontecorvo, Romania has proven to be an inspiration and favoured location for Italian cinema, which is looks increasingly more to Eastern Europe.

Bondi’s film centres on Gemma, an elderly Florentine widow played by Ilaria Occhini, and Angela, her young caretaker (Doroteea Petre, a Cannes award-winner for The Way I Spent the End of the World. The relationship between the two lonely women culminates in a trip to the Black Sea, to look for Angela’s husband (Vlad Ivanov, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days [trailer, film focus]), who has mysteriously disappeared.

Not new to stories of affinity and solidarity between women (the prostitute of his short film Ora d’aria confesses to a crime she did not commit to return to her former cellmate), the director wrote the film with Ugo Chiti, co-screenwriter of Matteo Garrone’s forthcoming Gomorra [trailer, film focus].

Mar nero is being produced by Francesco Pamphili of Film Kairos in collaboration with RAI Cinema and the Toscana Film Commission, in co-production with HiFilm (Romania) and Manigolda Film (France) and with support from the MEDIA Plus Programme and the Italian Ministry of Culture (MiBAC).

(Translated from Italian)