The Pioneers (first feature)

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Trailer

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The Pioneers (I Pionieri)

original title:

I Pionieri

directed by:

screenplay:

Eleonora Cimpanelli, Pierpaolo Pirone, Luca Scivoletto, from his novel with the same title

cinematography:

costume design:

music:

Luca Scivoletto, Alessandro “Asso” Stefana

production:

world sales:

country:

Italy

year:

2022

film run:

86'

format:

colour

release date:

13/04/2023

festivals & awards:

In the Sicily of the late 1980s, Enrico Belfiore’s parents have a single passion: politics, the Party, and Communism. And they have raised their children in keeping with these principles. Enrico, however, unlike his friend Renato who thinks only about being a good Communist, wants to be a normal boy, wear shoes like everyone else, and play football; he wants to shake off his irritating renown as a little Soviet. And so it is that one day he decides to run away from home, taking shelter with the inseparable Renato in the woods, where his friend intends to re-establish the now defunct division of Pionieri d’Italia, the “Pioneers of Italy,” a Communist scout camp. In this “enterprise,” they will be helped by new companions: Victor, the great, big bully who is the son of a Fascist-sympathizing construction worker; and Margherita, a determined Italian/American girl who has run away from the nearby NATO base, and with whom Enrico will fall in love. For the four of them that summer, their escape, born as a game, will soon become a path of growth through which they will abandon their adolescence, bursting the bubble of certainties that had protected them until then.