The film L’arbitro (The Referee) is a development of the short film by the same title L’Arbitro, winner in 2009 of the David di Donatello prize and of the Prix Spécial du Jury at Clermont-Ferrand, the most important short film festival in Europe.
One of the aspects of our esthetic research is a mixture of tones and film genres. the prevalent register is the comedic, but we have chosen to punctuate it with darker shades: for example in some of the moments of the personal journey which will lead the international referee Cruciani to professional ‘damnation’ or in a thin subplot related to the ancestral codes of Sardinia’s pastoral world.
At the same time, the epic and the grotesque registers, the highbrow and the lowbrow coexist and sometimes alternate in unforeseeable ways. On one hand the evocative music of Andrea Guerra, the abstract and elegant photography in black and white, the rhetoric of slow motion, on the other hand the ungraceful bodies of the lowest level footballers, the burlesque, the grotesque and a sometimes very simple, very direct comedy. I have chosen to use black and white also to obtain the maximum degree of abstraction from reality and from time, to avoid that the film could be perceived as an objective representation of the world of football or of a particular geographical context.