original title:
Lucania
directed by:
cast:
screenplay:
cinematography:
editing:
set design:
music:
Gabriele Bonolis, Antonio Infantino, Cypress Grove, Maria Angeli
producer:
production:
Fabrique Entertainment, Palosanto Films, Rai Cinema, supported by Ministero della Cultura, with the support of Lucana Film Commission
distribution:
102 Distribution [Italy], SBS [Australia], Cinemaworld [Bangladesh], Cinemaworld [Brunei Darussalam], Cinemaworld [Cambodia], Cinemaworld [China], Amazon Prime Video [Germany], Cinemaworld [Hong Kong], Cinemaworld [India], Cinemaworld [Indonesia], Cinemaworld [Macao], Cinemaworld [Malaysia], Cinemaworld [Mongolia], Cinemaworld [Pakistan], Cinemaworld [Philippines], Cinemaworld [Singapore], Cinemaworld [South Korea], Cinemaworld [Sri Lanka], Cinemaworld [Taiwan], Cinemaworld [Thailand], Amazon Prime Video [United Kingdom], Amazon Prime Video [United States], Cinemaworld [Viet Nam]
world sales:
country:
Italy
year:
2019
film run:
85'
format:
colour
release date:
20/06/2019
festivals & awards:
Lucania is an ancient story set in modern times. It tells of a land and of its people, working its fields, celebrating or
exploiting it, where the characters live in close relationship with the landscape they belong to. A magical, inaccessible and silent land, enclosed between the mountains and the sea, where nothing is the way it seems.
Here is where Rocco and Lucia live, a severe father, rooted to the land like a tree, who fights to defend it until his last sacrifice, and a wild girl, unable to speak since the death of her mother Argenzia, who possesses the gift of seeing and feeling her mother’s soul. The father, who sees her talking to the wind, believes her to be under an evil spell and desperately submits her to healing rituals of a peasant sorceress.
One day Rocco refuses Carmine’s offer, a lorry driver who asks him to bury toxic waste in his land in exchange for money and, due of the consequences of his actions, he is forced to escape on foot to save his daughter. Thus the journey begins: one of atonement for Rocco and the coming of age of Lucia. A long journey through the beauty of an untamed nature and the harshness of a dying land, where the girl will grow into a woman, leaving behind the memory of her mother in order to help her father, aggravated by the burden of his guilt. A world of the vanquished in which a light of hope shines, embodied by a young mute woman who regains her voice. Lucia is the land, forced to witness the fatal clash between her farmer father and those who want to poison the fields, in this touching journey full of magic and redemption.
DIRECTOR’S NOTES:
A close relationship exists between the fruits of the earth and the people who work the land. The fragility and delicacy of the first are of the same nature of the raw stubbornness of the latter, whose character is forged by the fatigue of survival, in mountains and valleys cutting trough the blue sky. This film is an adventure rooted in the nature of the high lands that deals with the eternal struggle of a man who defends his land from the destructive hands of those who pollut it. It is born of an ancient need to confront an absolutely contemporary issue: the universal value of the preservation of the planet. In the lonely wilderness of days and nights spent walking outdoors, we look at the world with the eyes of our protagonists, Rocco’s hieratic glance and Lucia’s fervent passion. The first is taciturn, brutal and compassionate. While the girl, an unpredictable seductive body, is capable to awake the powerful soul of the Earth. The Earth embodies in her, in the electricity of her dance. A hope filled with magic to reaffirm that beauty lies “in a future where an ancient heart beats”.