Pio

Weniger attraktiv für die Zuschauer*innen, aber was die Aussage betrifft, eine gleichwertige Variante von City of God. Der Film spielt in einer Roma-Gemeinschaft in Kalabrien. Es wird in ihm nicht geschossen, seine Form ist bescheiden. Man spürt daraus aber fast physisch die Verwirrung und den innerlichen Kampf des heranwachsenden Jungen mit der gesellschaftlichen Einordnung. Es ist der Verdienst der Regie, des realen Milieu und der sich anstrengenden Nicht-Schauspieler*innen. Der Anfang des Nachspanns mit ihren Namen ist der Höhepunkt des Films. (05.07.2017)

A Ciambra, one of the most compelling Italian films of recent years, takes place in the Romani community in Calabria and obverses the adolescence of young Pio, who appeared in two of the director’s previous films (one of which was a short version of A Ciambra). Carpignano wrote the screenplay on the basis of interviews with the lead actor and other, non-professional actors, whose world he depicts in the least distorted way possible and with whom he spent a relatively long time before the actual filming to order to gain their trust (among other things, he relocated to Calabria and adopted the local dialect). Thanks to that, the film is not an aloof anthropological study, but rather a view of the world through the eyes of characters, to whose rhythm of life the camera movement, or rather the rhythm of the narrative, is also adapted. Unlike a number of other veristic festival dramas, A Ciambra is a narratively masterful and extraordinarily dynamic film that shows that the legacy of neorealism is still (or again?) very much alive in Italy. Carpignano decidedly ranks among the emerging talents of Italian cinema who are worth keeping an eye on. 75% (08.04.2018)