When Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino reached his milestone 50th birthday, he decided the occasion was ripe with the potential to break away from many of the enduring ways he made distinctive, much lauded projects (including Academy Award winner The Great Beauty, Youth, Il Divo, The Consequences of Love and The Young Pope) and experiment with new cinematic and storytelling techniques.
And for his next film, The Hand of God, he decided to plumb the depths of his own past as well.“Why now?” ponders Sorrentino. “I started to look at the past, without being too much involved.
So in these past years, I’m able to see into my past with sort of an objective lens, and this is helpful to put in order the things in my life.”“I had this story I was scared to do because it’s very personal, but because it’s a painful story — even if there is a part of comedy — I thought it was a good idea to share my pain with a potential audience and see if that pain was only about me or also about other people,” Sorrentino says of his autobiographical tale, set in the 1980s amid the scenic but little documented splendors of his native Naples, which he finally returned to for production decades after he left the city.“It’s the dream of this young man who had a life split in two very precise paths.
One was when he was young, around 16, 17, and there was this happy family and light and his life was full of joy,” Sorrentino says of the tale of his screen avatar, young filmmaker-in-the-making Fabietto Schisa, played by Filippo Scotti. “Then after a tragedy – he loses his parents – life will become another thing.
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