Italy has made its return to this year’s Cannes Film Festival with two of the country’s best directors: Matteo Garrone and Alice Rohrwacher. Some years ago both filmmakers had already participated and obtained the Grand Prix of the jury at the French festival: Garrone in 2008 with his film Gomorra and Rohrwacher with Le meraviglie in 2014. In the section of “un certain regard” there was also Valeria Golino‘s, Euophoria, the story of two brothers who meet again after a long period away from each other.
Rohrwacher’s film, Happy as Lazaro, tells us about the “spiritual” friendship between “an extremely kind and naive peasant and a boy spoiled by his imagination”. The friendship between these two characters, however, clashes against secrets and painful lies. Garrone’s Dogman, inspired by a Roman crime that took place in 1989, is the famous story of Canaro della Magliana, who murdered and tortured a former amateur boxer. The Italian director portrays a poor suburban life of violence and humiliation, which will push Canaro to react with equal wickedness and aggression towards his enemy.
Another notorious Italian film, Sorrentino’s Loro, has remained for now out of the festival. Thierry Frémaux has not yet given a definitive answer, but he justified this decision by saying: “There are so many films that have been hypothesized by the media and have not entered the list because we wanted to host authors who have never been in the festival”. Moreover, the nature of this project is also different from the format generally presented at the festival, since Sorrentino’s film is divided into two parts and the first will be released in the theatres before Cannes.
