RAI Com Takes World Sales on ‘Shadow of the Day,’ Starring Riccardo Scamarcio (EXCLUSIVE)
variety.comNick Vivarelli International CorrespondentRAI Com is launching sales at the online EFM on Giuseppe Piccioni’s Fascist-era drama ‘L’Ombra del giorno,” starring Italian A-lister Riccardo Scamarcio (“Three Floors”) and Benedetta Porcaroli (“Baby,” “The Catholic School”).Pic, which Scamarcio produced, is a love story with a thriller twist set in 1938, two years before Italy entered World War II.
It unfolds entirely in the central Italian town of Ascoli Piceno, a hidden gem with gorgeous medieval monuments, churches and piazzas.The film’s title translates as “The Shadow of the Day,” a reference to the darkness of Fascism.Luciano (Scamarcio), a wounded World War I veteran and a sympathizer of Fascism like most Italians at the time, runs a classy restaurant overlooking the town’s ancient square.
He hires Anna (Porcaroli), a young woman with a secret, to work in the kitchen and they becomes romantically entangled. Then the onset of war prompts the pic to “veer off into thriller territory,” Scamarcio said.
Piccioni, who wrote the screenplay with Gualtiero Rosella and Annick Emdin, is a veteran Italian helmer specializing in adult melodramas, whose “Light of My Eyes” (2011) and “These Days” (2016) both launched from Venice.Besides Scamarcio and Porcaroli, who broke out with Netflix series “Baby,” based on a real Rome teen prostitution scandal, Lino Musella (“The Hand of God”), Vincenzo Nemolato (“Gomorrah”) and Sandra Ceccarelli (“Blanca”) round out the cast.“Shadow,” which was made on a €2.8 million ($3.1 million) budget, is produced by Scamarcio’s Lebowski shingle with RAI Cinema.RAI Cinema’s 01 Distribution will release the film in Italian cinemas on 250 screens on Feb.
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