19/05/2008

Marco Tullio Giordana is back at Cannes in a Special Screening tonight of a film about renowned actors Luisa Ferida and Osvaldo Valenti (Monica Bellucci and Luca Zingaretti). Sanguepazzo [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (“Mad Blood”) centres on the end of their lives when, as supporters of Fascism and part of Mussolini’s Salò Republic they were accomplices to the torturers of Villa Triste in Milan and were later killed.

"I saw the faces of these two actors in an old film 25 years ago," said the director at the press conference. "My mother said it was scandalous. I waned to know more and I became really interested in the story, in its complexity and the obscurity of that period of history. It was also connected to Italian cinema, with its original sin: the proximity with power".

The words spoken by Luigi Lo Cascio in the last scene, after the actors’ execution, could stir controversy and suspicions of "revisionism" but Giordana does not care. "He has doubts,” said the director, “about whether or not he actually carried out justice. But that was not an act of justice. Luisa Ferida was declared totally innocent. As far as Valenti’s innocence, I can’t produce an official document, but neither can anyone to the contrary, of his absolute guilt.

“But I would’ve acted in the same way, perhaps remaining hurt my entire life. In that moment of civil war, the symbolically responsible had to be hit in order to absolve all the others. Yet that war isn’t over, because there exists an unhealthy way of passing down memories. We must stop all that. Not by covering it up but through the courage to talk about it".

The film – which will be released in Italy on Friday by 01 Distribution and is scheduled to air on television in a longer version – was made for €10m, 20% of which came from the French. "It took years to find the money for such an expensive and complex film," said Giordana. "We found it thanks to Angelo Barbagallo, RAI Cinema, Paradis and Orly, Canal and Eurimages".

(Translated from Italian)