Writer-director Jonas Carpignano follows his 2015 Cannes discovery, 'Mediterranea,' with another insightful look at a different marginalized community in Southern Italy. One of the more memorable peripheral characters lifted from reality in Jonas Carpignano's humanistic and timely plunge into the European refugee crisis, Mediterranea, was Pio Amato, a crafty preteen operator from a Romani family on the edges of a Calabrian town called Gioia Tauro. Already the subject of an identically titled short film, this magnetic Dickensian hustler now gets a richly contextualized feature portrait in A Ciambra, a coming-of-age drama with a stealthy emotional charge that further enhances the writer-director's reputation as a gifted practitioner of Italian neo-neorealism. Executive producer Martin Scorsese's name should help the film secure distribution, but its greatest asset by far is the fascinating specificity of this snapshot of a transitional period in life common to all cultures. Pio was 14 when the film was made, on the precipice of premature adulthood. As dramatized with unerring authenticity by Carpignano using nuggets of the boy's own experience, he's impatient to grow up and assert his masculinity. But he's also somewhat regretful about leaving behind the innocence of childhood, particularly after he gets a stinging taste of failure, humiliation and moral compromise. In A CIAMBRA, a small Romani community in Calabria, Pio Amato is desperate to grow up fast. At 14, he drinks, smokes and is one of the few to easily slide between the. A Ciambra follows the compelling coming of age story of a young man named Pio (Pio Amato) who is thrust into adulthood when his father and brother are locked up. Premiering in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes, the movie, at two hours, is overlong for a work so loosely observational and almost non-narrative in its documentary-style slice of life. But the subject matter keeps it engrossing, as does Carpignano's masterful ability to coax nuanced, unselfconscious characterizations out of untrained actors essentially playing versions of themselves. That includes some 15 members of the fractious but fiercely loyal and loving Amato clan, dominated by Pio's mother Iolanda, a tough matriarch cut from the classic mold. The movie is a companion piece to Mediterranea, Carpignano's feature debut, but also a continuation. It zooms in on another faction of the same cluster of communities around the quarter that supplies the title, where gypsy families, the Italians who regard them as inferiors, and North Africans, who have even less acknowledged visibility, live in relatively close proximity. Their interactions are often uneasy, though one of the more tender threads in the story — as well as the source of its most searing conflict — is Pio's friendship with Ayiva (Koudous Seihon), a migrant from Burkina Faso first encountered in the 2015 film. Pio's role model, however, is his older brother Cosimo (Damiano Amato), who brings in cash via car theft and burglaries, and answers to a local Italian crime ring. Given that almost all the adult male Amatos either are in prison or under house arrest at some point in the movie, it's clear that low-level crime is a given within the group's social fabric, right down to them piggybacking on utility cables to avoid electrical bills. But arguably the most essential quality of Carpignano's filmmaking is the absence of judgment.
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April 2018
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