| Director: | Pupi Avati |
|---|---|
| Production: | DueA Film (Antonio Avati), Minerva Pictures (Santo Versace, Gianluca Curti), Rai Cinema |
| Running Time: | 107’ |
| Language: | Italian, English |
| Country: | Italy |
| Main Cast: | Filippo Scotti, Rita Tushingham, Mildred Gustaffsson, Roberto De Francesco, Chiara Caselli, Armando De Ceccon, Morena Gentile, Romano Reggiani, Nicola Nocella, Massimo Bonetti |
| Screenplay: | Pupi Avati, Tommaso Avati |
| Cinematographer: | Cesare Bastelli |
| Editor: | Ivan Zuccon |
| Production Designer: | Biagio Fersini |
| Costume Designer: | Beatrice Giannini |
| Music: | Stefano Arnaldi |
| Sound: | Fono Roma Movies & Sound, Pompeo Iaquone |
| Visual Effects: | Blackstone Studio, Fabio Tomassetti, Daniele Tomassetti |
Cinema
L’orto americano
Out of Competition
SYNOPSIS
L’orto americano tells the story of a young psychopath with literary ambitions who finds himself falling in love with a young American army nurse. We are in Bologna on the eve of Liberation and, for this troubled young man, merely exchanging glances with the beautiful soldier is enough to make him think of her as the love of his life. By chance, the following year he moves to the American Midwest into a house adjacent to that of his beloved (actually separated from it by a sinister garden). The woman’s elderly mother lives there, desperate for her daughter’s disappearance: after the end of the war, she wrote home that she was going to marry an Italian man, and hasn’t been heard from since. The young man thus embarks on a nerve-racking quest that will plunge him right into an extremely dramatic situation, until, in Italy, it all comes to a completely unexpected conclusion.
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
Given the current “gothic” wave, with L’orto americano we have expanded its boundaries by setting an initial portion of the story in the American Midwest and the following part in Italy’s own Midwest analogue: the great Po River Delta. For the first time in our filmography we bring to the screen the Italian post-war period. That season in the history of our country right after the end of the Second World War, still saturated with the horrifying stench of fear and hunger against a backdrop of absolute devastation. It is in this Italy, as the bodies of many young soldiers are recovered from either side of the front lines, in the attempt to restore society to a makeshift lawfulness, that our protagonist goes after a desperate quest for a completely idealised love. It is through this image of an Italy reduced to rubble, compared with America’s “congeniality”, that we can symbolically trace the mental distress of our narrator. And it is through the reconstruction of a criminal trial of the time, with the defendant guilty of unspeakable crimes, that we are brought back to a season of social life with a pressing need for an unambiguous return to normality: a time when, however, this condition of urgency meant that many verdicts and sentences were hastily pronounced.
Production/Distribution
PRODUCTION 1: Antonio Avati - DUEA FILM SPA
Piazza Cola di Rienzo
00192 Rome, Italy
Tel. 39 063214851
dueafilm@dueafilmspa.it
PRODUCTION 2: GIANLUCA CURTI, SANTO VERSACE - MINERVA PICTURES
Via Marcella 4/6
00153 Rome, Italy
Tel. 39 06 84242430
gcurti@minervapictures.com
segreteria@minervapictures.com
PRODUZIONE 3/PRODUCTION 3: PAOLO DEL BROCCO - RAI CINEMA
Piazza Adriana 12
00193 Rome, Italy
Tel. 39 06 33179601
paolo.delbrocco@raicinema.it
WORLD SALES: MONICA CIARLI - MINERVA PICTURES
Via Marcella 4/6
00153 Rome, Italy
Tel. 39 06 8424 2430
monica@minervapictures.com
ITALIAN DISTRIBUTION: Luigi Lonigro - 01 Distribution
Piazza Adriana, 12
00193 Rome, Italy
Tel. 39 0633179601
luigi.lonigro@raicinema.it
ITALIAN PRESS OFFICE: PUNTOeVIRGOLA - Flavia Schiavi & Olivia Alighiero
Via Natale del Grande 40
00153 Rome, Italy
Tel. +39 0645763506
info@studiopuntoevirgola.com
