05/09/2006

There is a large river in China called the Yangzi (or Chang Jiang), renamed the Blue River by Westerners, which will become a 600-kilometre lake at the base of an immense dam. Shanghai and other cities need an additional 18,000 megawatts and it matters little that dozens of villages will have to be evacuated. This is progress.

Sergio Castellitto, who in Gianni Amelio’s new film The Missing Star [+see also:
trailer
film profile] plays a specialised factory worker by the name of Vincenzo Buonavolontà, goes up that river to reach a steel mill that acquired a blast furnace from his closed factory. Vincenzo is convinced that the apparatus is defective and thus takes with him a small hydraulic plant with which to replace it.

After the story of Italian immigration in Turin in the late 1950s (The Way We Laughed) and one man’s unwitting journey in Albania that captured the exodus of illegal immigrants (LamericaI, Amelio, the top Italian in competition at the festival, set out to uncover a China of great contradictions, expanding cities and vast, depressed provinces, making a film of tenacious lyricism in which an Italian factory worker comes up against a large country in full modernisation.

"I didn’t want to make yet another documentary on global development,” explained the director, "but to tell an eternal story: the need to live, to not give up, the story of a man who lives in the west but seems to have abandoned certain spiritual needs".

Wrapped in the photography of Luca Bigazzi, who favours blue tones, Castellitto here comes up against one of his greatest acting challenges, identifying as he did with the filmmaker’s vision. "I have rarely felt so loved, so sought out by a director’s camera", said the Roman actor during a crowded press conference. His stubborn and optimistic Vincenzo, travelling with a young Chinese interpreter (debut actress Tai Ling) who teaches him tenderness, will arrive at the end of the quixotic enterprise to have his soul soothed.

Loosely based on Danilo Rea’s novel La dismissione, The Missing Star was shot in China in 80 days and was produced, through great logistical and financial trials and tribulations, by RAI Cinema and Cattleya, in co-production with France and Switzerland (Babe Productions, Carac Film, RTSI), in association with Achab Film and backing from Eurimages and Oak3.

The film will be released this Friday in Italy on 250 screens by 01 Distribution and distributed internationally by Lakeshore Entertainment.

(Translated from Italian)