Italy’s Fandango Sales has taken global distribution rights outside Italy to Locarno competition entry “Luce” directed by Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino.
The pair is best known for their 2017 movie “Crater” (“Il Cratere”) which played the Venice’s Critics Week in 2017 and won the special jury award at Tokyo.
“Luce” – which is produced by Oscar-nominated producer Donatella Palermo (“Fire at Sea”) – stars Marianna Fontana (“Indivisibili,” “Capri, Revolution”) as a woman in her early twenties who has an alienating job in a leather factory in a cold and rainy town in Southern Italy “and feels the need to fill an absence in her life,” as the provided synopsis puts it.
“One day on the beach, she has a sudden inspiration,” it adds, and from that moment onwards her life also becomes someone else’s. “A voice on her cellphone becomes a tenuous line between her desires, her imagination, and the world around her,” the synopsis goes on to explain.
“We have tried to approach this [story] through the tumult of a young woman in a context that wants her [to appear] as a mere worker, ignorant and subdued. Said the “Luce” co-helmers in their directors’ statement.
“These pressures force her into a dubious choice while searching for an absence, for something lacking, and for a voice that becomes a parallel life. Perhaps invented, perhaps more real than reality,” they added.
The directors also specified that they shot “Luce” based on a script that was “rewritten day by day,” using “real places, real people, sequential shots,” and “acting that is no longer fiction but a staging of oneself” before going on to lavish praise on protagonist Marianna Fontana for being “the heart of the film.”
“Luce” is produced by Bellino’s Bokeh Film shingle and Palermo’s Stemal Entertainment with RAI Cinema.
Source Agencies
