31/01/2013 - Sardinian-language Italian feature Su Re, a retelling of Christ’s Passion, was presented in competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam

The stories recounted in the Bible continue to inspire filmmakers from around the world and the latest piece of evidence to support this notion, the Italian film The King [+see also:
trailer
film profile], had its international premiere in competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, currently under way.

Following in the footsteps of, amongst others, Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew, Alberto Serra’s Bird Song, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Gust Van den Berghe’s Little Baby Jesus of Flandr, Italian director Giovanni Columbu took his inspiration from the New Testament.

As the director explained in Rotterdam, he was especially interested in the contradictions between the four versions, in each of the Gospels, of the events surrounding Christ’s crucifixion, which are all held to be the sacred truth, thus giving rise to the idea of “personal reality” (as filtered through the personalities of each writer) which is really a modern concept, though the Gospels were written centuries ago.

For his version of Christ’s Passion, Columbu used events from all four Gospels and didn’t only shoot in mountainous Sardinia but had his unglamorous no-pro actors (a clear parallel to Pasolini’s working methods) also speak in Sardinian, which gives the entire film at once more local and a more universal flavour.

Shot in almost monochrome, handheld images, and with costumes that blend modernity with the familiar silhouettes of Roman soldiers’ attire and the pauper rags of the period, Su Re is suspended somewhere between realism and theatrical re-enactment (there are occasionally even shades of the Taviani Brothers’ Golden Bear-winning Caesar Must Die [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
film profile]).

Decidedly aimed at an arthouse audience, the film is distributed in Italy by Sacher Distribuzione and was produced by Columbu for Luches SRL.