Synopsis
The story of a Calabrian criminal family unfolds like a western set in our own day, where the laws of blood and the vendetta take precedence over everything. A tale that begins in the Netherlands and passes through Milan on its way to Calabria, amid the peaks of the Aspromonte, where everything begins and ends. Anime nere is the story of three brothers, the sons of a shepherd, close to the ’Ndrangheta, and of their divided soul. Luigi, the youngest, is an international drug dealer. Rocco, Milanese by adoption and a member of the middle class, runs a business funded by his brother’s ill-gotten gains. Luciano, the oldest, cherishes the pathological illusion of a preindustrial Calabria, conducting a gloomy and solitary dialogue with the deads. Leo, his twenty-year-old son, represents the lost generation, without an identity. All he has inherited from his forebears is hatred. As a result of a trivial quarrel he carries out an act of intimidation against a bar under the protection of the rival clan. Anywhere else it would have been no more than a prank. Not in Calabria. It’s the spark that sets off a blaze. Luciano finds himself in the same predicament as at the time his father was killed many years earlier. In a dimension suspended between the archaic and the modern the characters are drawn into the archetypes of tragedy.
Anime nere by Francesco Munzi – Italy, France, 103′
language: Italian – s/t English
Marco Leonardi, Peppino Mazzotta, Fabrizio Ferracane, Anna Ferruzzo, Barbora Bobulova

Director’s Statement
I shot the movie in the town that writers and journalists have stigmatized as among the most mafia ridden places in Italy, one of the nerve centers of the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta: Africo. When I told people I wanted to shoot there, everyone tried to dissuade me: too difficult the subject, too unapproachable, too dangerous. It was an impossible film. I asked Gioacchino Criaco, the author of Anime nere to help me. I arrived in Calabria full of prejudices and fears. The reality of what I found there was very complex and varied. I saw suspicion turn into curiosity and people open up their homes for us. I mixed my actors up with the inhabitants of the town, who performed and worked with the cast. Without them this film would have been poorer. Africo has a very rough history steeped in criminality but it is one that can help us to understand many things about our country. From Africo you can see Italy better.

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