Winner of the Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight Award and a rising voice of Italian cinema, filmmaker Jonas Carpignano continues his exploration of the intricacies of life in contemporary Calabria with this compelling character study of a teenager, Chiara, who gradually comes to discover that her close-knit family is not all that it seems. In this furiously paced drama, Chiara investigates her father’s disappearance just one day after her oldest sister’s birthday. As she gets closer to the difficult truth about her mysteriously missing father — and the crime syndicates that control her region — Chiara is forced to decide what kind of future she wants for herself.
“One could argue that by not showing the horrific toll of the illegal drug trade, Carpignano brushes it under the carpet and lets the notoriously violent ‘Ndrangheta off light, but this isn’t a film about the Mafia. Instead, it’s about growing up inside a loving community that harbors a terrible secret, and whether breaking apart a family is really the best way of breaking up The Family.” —Jay Weissberg, Variety “With a documentary-like authenticity, this is a touching, powerful film with a lyrical visual palette and a superb sense of time and place…. Told in a wonderfully fluid and poetic fashion, led by Tim Curtin’s photography and an emotive score from Dan Romer and, of all people, BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD director Benh Zeitlin.” —Ed Frankl, The Film Stage
