| Director: | Paolo Sorrentino |
|---|---|
| Production: | The Apartment, Netflix |
| Running Time: | 130’ |
| Language: | Italian |
| Country: | Italy |
| Main Cast: | Filippo Scotti, Toni Servillo, Teresa Saponangelo, Marlon Joubert, Luisa Ranieri, Renato Carpentieri, Massimiliano Gallo, Betti Pedrazzi, Biagio Manna, Ciro Capano, Enzo Decaro, Sofya Gershevich, Lino Musella |
| Screenplay: | Paolo Sorrentino |
| Cinematographer: | Daria D’Antonio |
| Editor: | Cristiano Travaglioli |
| Production Designer: | Carmine Guarino |
| Costume Designer: | Mariano Tufano |
Cinema
È stata la mano di Dio
Venezia 78 Competition
Synopsis
The story of a young man’s heartbreak and liberation in Naples, Italy. It’s the 1980s and 17-year old Fabietto Schisa might be an awkward Italian teen struggling to find his place, but he finds joy in an amazing family who love life, relish mischief and take deep pleasure in meddling in one another’s complicated relationships. Then comes a pair of events that alter everything. One is the triumphant arrival in Naples of a god-like athletic legend: high-flying soccer idol Maradona, who has Fabietto, and the whole scrappy city, feeling a pride that once seemed impossible. The other is an inconceivable accident that will drop the bottom out of Fabietto’s world—setting his future in motion. Seemingly saved by Maradona, touched by chance or the hand of God, Fabietto wrestles with the nature of fate, the confusion of loss, and the intoxicating freedom of being alive. In his most movingly personal film, Sorrentino takes audiences on a sensory journey bursting with the contrasts of tragedy and comedy, love and desire, absurdity and beauty, as Fabietto finds the only way out of total catastrophe through his own imagination.
Director’s statement
The Hand of God is a coming-of-age story that aims, stylistically, to avoid the traps of conventional autobiography: hyperbole, victimhood, pity, compassion, and the indulgence of pain, through a simple, sparse, and essential staging and with neutral, sober music and photography. Cinematography’s apparatus will take a step back so as to let the life of those years speak, in the way I remember them—in the way I experienced them, felt them. Simply put, this is a film about sensibility. And hovering above everything, so close and yet so far, is Maradona, that ghostly idol, five foot five, who seemed to sustain the lives of everyone in Naples, or at least mine.
Production/Distribution
PRODUCTION 1: The Apartment
Via Nicotera 29
00195 - Roma, Italia
https://www.theapartment.it
PRODUCTION 2: Cai Mason – Netflix
Tel. +31 6 297 292 79
cmason@netflix.com
WORLD SALES: Cai Mason – Netflix
Tel. +31 6 297 292 79
cmason@netflix.com
ITALIAN DISTRIBUTION: Cai Mason – Netflix
Tel. +31 6 297 292 79
cmason@netflix.com
PRESS OFFICE: Charles McDonald & Matthew Sanders – International Rescue
charles@charlesmcdonald.co.uk
matthew@matthewsanders.org.uk
ITALIAN PRESS OFFICE: Gianluca Pignatelli, Benedetta Lucherini, Daniele Massironi - Studio Lucherini Pignatelli gianluca@studiolucherinipignatelli.it benny@studiolucherinipignatelli.it daniele@studiolucherinipignatelli.it
