In Italian filmmaker Jonas Carpignano’s In “A Ciambra,” the lines between documentary and fiction are blurred to the point of non-existence
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In “A Ciambra,” Italian filmmaker Jonas Carpignano’s sort-of sequel to 2015’s “Mediterranea,” the lines between documentary and fiction are blurred to the point of non-existence.
The director follows a Romani family who play versions of themselves, and specifically focuses on a 14-year-old boy named Pio (Pio Amato), whose petty crime apprenticeship with his father and older brothers leads to adult responsibilities before he’s ready, as well as a potentially devastating moral crisis.
Pio lives with his large, extended family in a run-down apartment complex on the abandoned outskirts of Gioia Tauro, a small southern Italian port city known for its part in international drug movement and for the way its city government collapses every time organized crime groups like ‘Ndrangheta step in to take over. The family exists outside of the larger crime mechanics of the town, but close enough to scrounge a subsistence living from it. At home, they loudly talk over one another, the toddlers smoke cigarettes, and the local cops routinely show up to harass whoever happens to be standing outside.
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Though it’s only the crumbs of criminal enterprise left to families like Pio’s, they make ends meet stealing this and that, at least until Pio’s father and older brother wind up with short stretches in prison. Appointing himself breadwinner, the charismatic boy works overtime to prove his manhood. He steals cars and sells them back to their owners for 300 euros each, he makes off with tech equipment when he can and, in a moment of teenage overreach, he cases the home of an Italian crime family with disastrous, reverberating results.
Pio’s one friend and older brother substitute, Aviya (Koudous Seihon), is an immigrant from Burkina Faso, whose own struggle for survival was the subject of “Mediterranea.” That film featured a younger Pio making noise on the narrative sidelines, and here Aviya’s steady presence provides the tenderness and wisdom that balances the chaotic rough-love delivered by Pio’s clan. Yet their relationship will be tested by Pio’s dive into dangerous situations that call for unwinnable adult decisions.
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Plot details like these make “A Ciambra” sound tailor-made for an executive producer like Martin Scorsese, a filmmaker well acquainted with the workings of families whose business is crime. But Carpignano — an Independent Spirit Award nominee for directing — is far less interested in the epic mechanics of how the flat screen TV falls off the truck, and far more on the personal daily details of the people inhabiting this world. The structural conditions keeping Pio and his family poor, marginalized, and too often imprisoned are suggested but not explicitly shown, communicated through familial bickering and weathered, exhausted faces.
Working with first time cinematographer Tim Curtin, Carpignano’s choice to go small, to calmly detail the life of a boy born into a neighborhood that feels like an entire world, one that’s locked from the outside, recalls both “Mediterranea” and the social justice-minded films of Belgium’s Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. “A Ciambra” is intimate and documentary-like, approaching and then backing away from larger issues of marginalized and immigrant communities, showing rather than preaching, and most importantly, prioritizing Pio’s adolescent face and the way his eyes scrutinize his surroundings as they constantly look for opportunity, weak spots to break through.
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Occasionally, though, a dreamlike image of a silver horse wanders into the frame — the animal is also seen in an opening flashback sequence featuring Pio’s grandfather as a young man — momentarily interrupting Carpignano’s realist approach and distracting the boy with the promise of escape.
It’s a tactic that complicates “A Ciambra” only long enough to create a sense of undefined longing in the young man, and to remind the audience that for all his assertions of adulthood, this is still a child in need of a safer place to grow, one that doesn’t come with a built-in promise of lifetime poverty and turns behind bars.
18 Things You Didn’t Know About ‘The Departed’ for Its 10th Anniversary (Photos)
Now that 10 years have passed since it entered theaters, “The Departed” fits comfortably among the canon of all-time great films. Directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg and Vera Farmiga, the gangster film and story of its making are filled with little known facts. Here are a few of them. Warner Bros.
1. It Took DiCaprio and Scorsese Only One Day to Decide to Do It “We read the script in one day and called each other the next day and said ‘Let’s do this,'” recalled Leonardo DiCaprio in an interview. He said William Monahan ‘s script “was so well-written.” Warner Bros.
2. Nicholson Didn’t Want His Role at First The three-time Oscar winner initially declined the role of Boston gang boss Frank Costello. “I always give a fast no when it’s no, and originally there wasn’t a part there,” Nicholson told New York Magazine . “I said, ‘I’d love to work with you, Marty, I’ve always wanted to work with you — and Leo — but I just can’t do something because I like the idea. I gotta have a part that I’m interested in.'” Scorsese, along with DiCaprio and Damon — who were already cast — agreed to expand the part. Warner Bros.
3. Dead Guy Easter Eggs Scorsese put a subtle “X” in the frame whenever anyone was killed onscreen as an homage to the 1932 version of “Scarface,” which is one of his favorite films and first employed the X factor. Warner Bros.
4. Sex Scenes Were Invented Nicholson suggested his character have sex scenes. “These kind of monsters, they don’t usually have a sex life onscreen, so I wanted to bring that to the part,” he said in a 2006 interview . “I pushed that side pretty good. He’s a mad, bad nut job, so he’s evil sexually too.” Warner Bros.
5. Robert De Niro Was Initially Cast The actor, a Scorsese mainstay going back to 1973’s “Mean Streets, eventually decided to ditch “The Departed” to direct “The Good Shepard.” Getty
6. A First-Time Heavyweight Team-Up While it was highly publicized at the time, it’s still hard to believe the film marked Nicholson and Scorsese’s first ever collaboration. Unlike DiCaprio, who has done five Scorsese films, the two haven’t worked together since. Hey, there’s still time. Warner Bros.
7. Brad Pitt Was a Producer Pitt was initially attached to either one of the two lead roles eventually played by DiCaprio and Damon. Pitt eventually served as a producer on the film, one of the first projects out of his Plan B Entertainment.
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8. Boston Gangster Whitey Bulger Served as Inspiration Years before Johnny Depp signed on to play Bulger in a biopic (and five years before he was caught hiding out in California), Nicholson used the infamous gangster — and FBI informant — as a blueprint for the ruthless Costello. Warner Bros.
9. It Got Scorsese His Only Oscar Scorsese, one of the all-time greatest filmmakers, has won only one Academy Award in his six-decade career — for directing “The Departed.”
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10. Nicholson Went Off Script — a Lot “You never know what to expect from him because he can go off the cuff and just say anything or do anything,” DiCaprio said in an interview, recalling Nicholson’s many improvisations during filming. “In character, it instills this constant fear in you.” Warner Bros.
11. It Owes a Huge Debt to Another Movie Andy Lau’s 2002 Hong Kong crime thriller “Infernal Affairs,” released four years prior to “The Departed,” bears some uncanny similarities to the Oscar-winning Scorsese film.
