Rust

It’s a hot summer in the 1970s, in the north Italian suburbs of a town inhabited by immigrants from the south and the northeast. Here a gang spends its time playing games and clashing with other small gangs. That summer, a new physician arrives in the neighbourhood: the elegant and aristocratic Dr. Boldrini, who inspires awe from everyone. Three decades later, three adults are coming to grips with the daily reality of their lives. The echoes from that violent summer will inexorably invade their apparently normalised lives. “One of the themes of the film is something that I found extremely fascinating; what traces does a dramatic experience leave in someone? How do you survive an encounter with evil? How does the relationship with the world around us change, one which is indifferent to the war that so far only I know to have fought?”

Daniele Gaglianone, director

“This is a film with an absolute image, so powerful and significant as to go beyond the simple scheme of interpretation: the rusty castle that is to the film’s children a home, a fort, a trap, a place of fairy-tales and at the same time of menace, dominates everything. It creeps into their unconscious and into their memory to the extent that, even as adults, it doesn’t let go of them. The fairy-tale scheme is certainly essential to a story occupied by ogres, unhappy princesses, by knights who bear the memory of a permanent stain. But play and fantasy are neither defenceless nor ingenious and behind the mask, pain, remorse and fear are part of the norm. To the point of marking forever three lives exposed too early to the horror that we are not prepared to see in our every-day lives.”

Giorgio Gosetti, Venice FF