Il Mestiere, debut feature from Beppe Tufarulo, was presented in the Notti Veneziane section of the Giornate degli Autori at the 83rd Venice Film Festival.
The story follows Sauro Cantafame (Luigi Lo Cascio) who "fixes" the dead for a living, installing mechanical hearts in the bodies of the deceased so they appear alive. Thanks to this trick, their families continue to collect their pensions. He travels Southern Italy in his Ape car, crossing a violent, lunar borderland, that is both real and highly improbable.
“Sauro Cantafame, tragic antihero, exercises a profession that's illegal according to the written law, but sacred by necessity," Tufarulo explains. "In his world, death isn't the end of something: it's a resource. Il Mestiere is a film about a South that doesn't exist on the maps. A tribal South, positioned on the edge, a place with no certainties, it’s a sort of lawless West where the rules have been broken, and with that the distinction between what's true and what's invented. I searched for a frontier land, suspended in a light that seems like night even during the day. The landscape isn't a backdrop: it acts, judges, sometimes forgives. It's the third character in the story. And within this landscape, there's a rarefied periphery where the protagonists' solitude takes shape. It simply exists. Everything is real and surreal at the same time: theatre companies performing Shakespeare on the edge of broken bridges, supermarkets of religious offices, white mountains of refrigerators to climb, quarries carved like canyons, human footprints from millions of years ago. The characters live and survive in this world of pity and violence, acceptance and hope, irony and drama; submissive, often devoted, or subjugated, to an overriding power that exacts material and moral tolls. Sauro Cantafame and Giocondo Infelice traverse this maze in their red Ape car, and at each stop they take something that changes them, without yet knowing it”.
The director created this tribal South, place with no defined borders, social rules, nor deep relationships, primarily in Calabria, in the Calanchi of Cutro, badlands that hosted scenes for Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to Matthew (1964), is a vast expanse of clay dunes on the slopes of the Sila range, between Cutro, Roccabernarda, Crotone, and Isola di Capo Rizzuto.
The home of Giocondo Infelice (Riccardo Maiello), who Sauro takes under his wing, is located in Fondo Gesù, a neighbourhood in Crotone on the right bank of the Esaro River. The makeshift stage where actors perform a Shakespeare play is at the foot of the abandoned bridge in Lamezia.
Part of the film was shot in the areas around Jesi and Ancona in the Marche region.
Il Mestiere, debut feature from Beppe Tufarulo, was presented in the Notti Veneziane section of the Giornate degli Autori at the 83rd Venice Film Festival.
The story follows Sauro Cantafame (Luigi Lo Cascio) who "fixes" the dead for a living, installing mechanical hearts in the bodies of the deceased so they appear alive. Thanks to this trick, their families continue to collect their pensions. He travels Southern Italy in his Ape car, crossing a violent, lunar borderland, that is both real and highly improbable.
“Sauro Cantafame, tragic antihero, exercises a profession that's illegal according to the written law, but sacred by necessity," Tufarulo explains. "In his world, death isn't the end of something: it's a resource. Il Mestiere is a film about a South that doesn't exist on the maps. A tribal South, positioned on the edge, a place with no certainties, it’s a sort of lawless West where the rules have been broken, and with that the distinction between what's true and what's invented. I searched for a frontier land, suspended in a light that seems like night even during the day. The landscape isn't a backdrop: it acts, judges, sometimes forgives. It's the third character in the story. And within this landscape, there's a rarefied periphery where the protagonists' solitude takes shape. It simply exists. Everything is real and surreal at the same time: theatre companies performing Shakespeare on the edge of broken bridges, supermarkets of religious offices, white mountains of refrigerators to climb, quarries carved like canyons, human footprints from millions of years ago. The characters live and survive in this world of pity and violence, acceptance and hope, irony and drama; submissive, often devoted, or subjugated, to an overriding power that exacts material and moral tolls. Sauro Cantafame and Giocondo Infelice traverse this maze in their red Ape car, and at each stop they take something that changes them, without yet knowing it”.
The director created this tribal South, place with no defined borders, social rules, nor deep relationships, primarily in Calabria, in the Calanchi of Cutro, badlands that hosted scenes for Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to Matthew (1964), is a vast expanse of clay dunes on the slopes of the Sila range, between Cutro, Roccabernarda, Crotone, and Isola di Capo Rizzuto.
The home of Giocondo Infelice (Riccardo Maiello), who Sauro takes under his wing, is located in Fondo Gesù, a neighbourhood in Crotone on the right bank of the Esaro River. The makeshift stage where actors perform a Shakespeare play is at the foot of the abandoned bridge in Lamezia.
Part of the film was shot in the areas around Jesi and Ancona in the Marche region.
Copyright: @ Lucia Iuorio
Luigi Lo Cascio, Mao Wen, Riccardo Maiello - Il Mestiere
Sauro Cantafame, a solitary man with a dramatic past, has an unusual profession: upon request, he "fixes" dead people, at times installing mechanical hearts in their bodies. In his Ape car, he traverses a violent, lunar, Southern frontier land, both real and improbable. His encounter with Giocondo, a closed boy with a mysterious gift, restores life and feelings, to the extent that he risks challenging the criminal reign of Vito la Scimmia, who rules over everything in that place on the edge of the world...
