THE power of cinema can sometimes provide us with a unique perspective on a familiar subject. That’s certainly the case with this raw, reality-inspired coming-of-age crime drama which gives a voice to a community rarely depicted in film and tracks how one young boy battles between tradition, masculinity and temptation.
The film is set in a Romani community in a small southern coastal town in modern-day Italy. We follow Pio (Pio Amato), a tenacious 14-year-old who is part of a family who sell scrap metal and stolen car parts to the local Mob. He is both entrenched in and bewildered by the world around him, desperate to grow up faster than his body allows.
He looks up to and emulates his older brother Cosimo (Damiano Amato), including chain-smoking, attending nightclubs and getting in with the wrong crowds. When both his brother and father are arrested, Pio sets out to prove he’s ready to step into his brother’s shoes, leading him to steal goods that he offloads to the nearby African immigrant community, which then welcomes him in.
What’s most notable and intriguing about the film is that the narrative is fictionalised around the real-life Amato family, with most of the actors playing dramatised versions of themselves. The performance of Pio is especially impressive because of this fact and he is particularly affecting in the scenes with Ayiva (Koudous Seihon), one of the African immigrants who quickly becomes something of a father figure to him.
This one-foot-in-reality approach immediately lends the drama a sense of lived-in, often uncomfortable authenticity. It helps to sell the believability even when it starts to slip into somewhat clichéd territory surrounding an impressionable youngster succumbing to the temptation of crime provided by forces both within and outwith his own community.
It exhibits shades of everything from Fernando Meirelles’s City of God to Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher, immersing us in a gritty yet vibrant atmosphere and showcasing director Jonas Carpignano’s keen eye for striking imagery that finds beauty in even the unlikeliest of places. One dreamlike scene involving Pio following a horse, silhouetted via streetlights then the embers of a fire, is particularly haunting.
It may ultimately drive its points home in a little too on-the-nose fashion, when lines of allegiance are more obviously drawn as it nears the end, and it’s easy to get a sense of the familiar path the story ultimately takes. But at the same time it feels like a universal story all too easy to befall kids like Pio and this film shines a welcome fresh light on it and the hectic world around him.
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