VIA CASTELLANA BANDIERA – EMMA DANTE

Shut inside their cars, two women face off in a silent duel that is fought out in the intimate violence of their stares. A wholly female duel punctuated by the refusal to drink, eat and sleep; more obstinate than the sun of Palermo and more stubborn than the ferocity of the men who surround them. For, as in every duel, it is a question of life or death… It’s a Sunday afternoon. The sirocco is blowing pitilessly in Palermo when Rosa and Clara lose their way in the streets of the city and end up in a sort of alley: Via Castellana Bandiera. At the same moment, another car driven by Samira, crammed with members of the Calafiore family, arrives from the opposite direction and enters the same street. Neither Rosa at the wheel of her Multipla, nor Samira, the old and stubborn woman driving a Punto, is willing to give way to the other, while the Calafiore family goes back into the unauthorized apartment house in which they live and, with the complicity of the local inhabitants, start taking bets on which of the two women will stick to her ground the longest. Evening falls, and then night creeps into the street and the houses of the neighborhood, but the two women, resisting hunger, sleep and thirst, seem to persevere in a mulishness that no longer has anything rational about it, and continue to refuse to give way…

Via Castellana Bandiera by Emma Dante – Italy, Switzerland, France, 90'

language: Italian, Sicilian dialect – s/t English, Italian

Elena Cotta, Emma Dante, Alba Rohrwacher, Renato Malfatti, Dario Casarolo, Carmine Maringola

Director’s Statement:

Via Castellana Bandiera is a street on which two women defy one another. Rosa’s block is mental and her obstruction of the road a matter of principle. Anyone could pass, cross the barrier and be free but no one does. Ties become indissoluble, pacts unbreakable. On the one hand there’s the entrance into the lobster pot in which live a party, a society and a family, on the other Rosa, with her love in the balance and a precipice at the end of the street. The pivot is an elderly woman. Samira. Mute. Above everything. Like a monolith. Like a breakwater that resists the currents. Like a hieroglyph scratched into the rock. Her lair is the car in which she has taken refuge. Forever. Life has no plot and Via Castellana Bandiera is a piece of life.