original title:
Effetto domino
directed by:
cast:
Diego Ribon, Mirko Artuso, Maria Roveran, Lucia Mascino, Roberta Da Soller, Nicoletta Maragno, Marco Paolini, Olivier Rabourdin, Valerio Mazzuccato, Silvio Comis, Stefano Scandaletti, Shi Yang Shi, Cristina Chinaglia, Vladimir Doda, Vitaliano Trevisan, Angelica Leo, Vasco Mirandola, Giancarlo Previati, Margherita Mannino, Paolo Pierobon, Andrew C. NG, Mateo Cili, Marco Artusi
screenplay:
Alessandro Rossetto, Caterina Serra, from the novel by Romolo Bugaro with the same title
cinematography:
editing:
set design:
costume design:
music:
producer:
production:
Jolefilm, Rai Cinema, with the support of Regione Veneto, IDM Film Commission Südtirol
distribution:
country:
Italy
year:
2019
film run:
104'
format:
colour
release date:
03/09/2019
festivals & awards:
In a spa town that is resistant to mass tourism, a building contractor and his surveyor partner launch an ambitious scheme: to convert twenty abandoned hotels into luxury residences for the wealthy retired. It is a commercial and globalised dream that is changing the town’s appearance, an operation of lifting that is giving it the warm and attractive air of Florida: not clinics where people go to die but paradises in which they can enjoy the twilight of their lives, spending everything they have left. It is the business of old age that someone, more powerful and visionary than these small entrepreneurs, is exploiting on the other side of the world, betting on extending the human lifespan endlessly. The sudden disappearance of funding from banks and investors triggers a domino effect on the fate of those who had hoped only to enrich themselves, ignorant of the loftier and longer-term plan of someone who has seen that profit lies in bodies which never die.
DIRECTOR’S NOTES:
From the out-of-the-way observation post of an industrious province, the main protagonists of the film pick up on a global trend. Thus I’ve chosen to locate the story on a planetwide plane: local and specific events reverberate all the way to the Far East and the collapse of a major property investment becomes the unwitting setting of a struggle of man against man. The film is the fruit of the domino effect itself, which drags and binds everything and everyone into internecine combat. Without realising it, the characters sink their teeth into one another like blind dogs. Each is torn to pieces just as he is about to do the same; he cannot help but attack, but will be mauled in turn.