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RELEASES Italy

Aimless generation and incest in Matteo Rovere’s Drifters

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- March 2 sees the release of the film based on Sandro Veronesi’s novel, uncensored, the main characters of which are careless young people without a goal, in search of their own identity

A careless generation, with no points of reference, which lives a lot but grasping little, as much in the eighties as in present days. Matteo Rovere’s second film, Drifters [+see also:
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film profile
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, is based on a book which came out over 20 years ago, written by Sandro Veronesi (author of Caos Calmo [+see also:
film review
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interview: Antonello Grimaldi
interview: Domenico Procacci
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, which inspired the homonymous film starring Nanni Moretti. Out on March 2, the film tells the story of an existential drama which revolves around an impossible love affair, that between a half-brother and a half-sister, and is made up of characters who are lost, tormented, aimless, against the background of a Rome that is chaotic, arrogant, immersed in its ruins and its social routines.

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Brought forward to the present day, "the drifters" are impersonated by Méte (Andrea Bosca, soon on screen in Ferzan Ozpetek’s Magnifica presenza [+see also:
film review
trailer
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) and Belinda (Miriam Giovannelli): he is a shadowy handwriting analyst, she is a teenager in search of her identity. They are half brother and sister, they have almost never met but they are forced to spend together the week preceding the marriage between the father they have in common (Massimo Popolizio, former football manager with ponytail) and her mother. An ambiguous bond forms between them, while they are surrounded by troubled and restless supporting characters: the biggest drifter of them all, Damiano (Michele Riondino), an estate agent and serial seducer, and Beatrice (Asia Argento), an egocentric and unstable PR girl; and then Bruno (Claudio Santamaria), Méte’s colleague, a keen graphologist and close observer of the world of the Drifters.

"A film that mixes light-heartedness with an important subject", is how Rovere defines it. "A story about temptation, more than about incest", explains the screenwriter Laura Paolucci (Also Managing Producer), who wrote the film together with the director and Francesco Piccolo, all while admitting that, in the film as in the book, everything leads to waiting for the love scene between the half brother and sister to be able to "question our own certainties". And it is probably precisely this scene which put Drifters in the A14 category, something which is not new to the 30-year-old, seeing as his first film, Un gioco da ragazze [+see also:
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ran up against censorship (see the news). After an appeal to the Commission, the restriction was dropped and the film will be available to all, in 80 cinemas, distributed by Fandango, who produced it together with Rai Cinema (€3M budget).

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(Translated from Italian)

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