110 mins |
Rated
M
In Official Selection at the Rome Film Festival, Giuseppe Bonito's L'Arminuta touches deep chords, our fears of abandonment, the bonds that are created with caregivers, the chances that life offers us by asking us to become adults before our time. Based on the bestseller that won the 2017 Campiello Prize by Donatella Di Pietrantonio - who wrote the film's subject and screenplay with Monica Zapelli, maintaining a stylistic and ideal continuity with the novel - the film is about motherhood and the inability to perform the role of mother, about women who are as determined and unstoppable as they are clueless, and about men who are powerless in the face of this courage.
We are in central Italy in the mid-1970s, presumably in the Abruzzo hinterland where the author of this book was born. Poverty and harshness dominate the lives and minds of the locals. A 13-year-old girl (Sofia Fiore) arrives at a farmstead from the city, wearing her little sugar-paper dress and long red hair. Her father accompanies her and she is welcomed by a humble family, consisting of a woman with a sorrowful look (Vanessa Scalera, Stolen Days), a strict father of very few words (Fabrizio Ferracane, The Peacock's Paradise), a man bent on working in a stone quarry, and five children. We soon discover that the one who will immediately be called the Arminuta (the "ritornata," the returned, in Abruzzi dialect) is part of that family. She was 'sold' when she was only six months old to a city cousin whose wealthy wife could not have children. Now the woman is ill, her adoptive father does not want to know about her and is returning her like a parcel.
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In Official Selection at the Rome Film Festival, Giuseppe Bonito's L'Arminuta touches deep chords, our fears of abandonment, the bonds that are created with caregivers, the chances that life offers us by asking us to become adults before our time. Based on the bestseller that won the 2017 Campiello Prize by Donatella Di Pietrantonio - who wrote the film's subject and screenplay with Monica Zapelli, maintaining a stylistic and ideal continuity with the novel - the film is about motherhood and the inability to perform the role of mother, about women who are as determined and unstoppable as they are clueless, and about men who are powerless in the face of this courage.
We are in central Italy in the mid-1970s, presumably in the Abruzzo hinterland where the author of this book was born. Poverty and harshness dominate the lives and minds of the locals. A 13-year-old girl (Sofia Fiore) arrives at a farmstead from the city, wearing her little sugar-paper dress and long red hair. Her father accompanies her and she is welcomed by a humble family, consisting of a woman with a sorrowful look (Vanessa Scalera, Stolen Days), a strict father of very few words (Fabrizio Ferracane, The Peacock's Paradise), a man bent on working in a stone quarry, and five children. We soon discover that the one who will immediately be called the Arminuta (the "ritornata," the returned, in Abruzzi dialect) is part of that family. She was 'sold' when she was only six months old to a city cousin whose wealthy wife could not have children. Now the woman is ill, her adoptive father does not want to know about her and is returning her like a parcel.