Set in Palermo, Sicily in 2012, the era of media mogul-turned-politician Silvio Berlusconi, the movie revolves around Giulio, a listless and dissatisfied boy of 16, who drifts through his days without any enthusiasm for school and no real future prospects.

But his encounter with Ketty, a more self-assured peer, offers him escape from the monotony. The two form a close friendship, a shared refuge in their search for freedom, far from the judgmental gaze of the adult world.

The film’s title refers to Ketty’s nickname in the Sicilian dialect.

Bellucci plays Giulio’s mother in an aristocratic Sicilian family that leaves her feeling oppressed.

The cinematography is by Camilla Cattabriga, with editing by Marco Costa.

Classic Italian Cinema

Guadagnino was asked about Italy’s rich cinematic history and if his decision to produce Tortorici’s movie was his way of keeping that tradition alive.

“Most definitely. We can agree that historically, Italian cinema, from the silent times until the ’70s, generated some of the most important personalities in history, but also as an industry, had created a system that was the envy of many other countries. Many different kind of films were being made.”

 

But then something happened with “the advent of private TV and the Berlusconi empire,” Guadagnino offered. “It dried up, and most of what was produced for cinema became TV. Genre was killed. A pretension on authorship became such that the great idea of cinema as authorship became people writing scripts and shooting their own scripts so that they could define themselves as authors.”

“In the end, the movie industry shrunk and the perspective shrunk and the cinema of Italy became sterile and totally devoid of language and of the idea of real life.”

Tortorici says:  “So when you meet a personality like Giovanni, who, of course, is an Italian filmmaker working in Italy, but I like to think that he’s a filmmaker, period, when you meet someone that is a complete rarity in the landscape of Italian cinema, you must protect it,” Guadagnino concluded. “You must make sure that every stone is not left unturned in order to give him the means to express himself. For me, introducing films such as Giovanni’s movies is a way to … set up a pavement into the future.”

He emphasized: “It’s about the mindset, which means how you do your stuff, what stories you tell, how you understand and interpret reality. How you run away from falseness is intoxicating for all its truth, all its incredible vivid reality.”

Guadagnino likes to experience a movie like anyone else: “As an audience member, I feel the movie really speaks in a very universal way.”

Adults Failure

Tortorici’s film explores how institutions, such as school, family and the state, fail kids. “I think the guilty ones are the adults. I think they just live in a cultural context of the ultra-capitalist contest and mediatic world.”

Tortorici’s future after two autobiographically inspired films?

“In my next movie, I’m going to explore something that is very far from me. Shooting this movie, I met a lot of people in Palermo, from difficult neighborhoods with difficult life experiences. I find in these stories the possibility to continuing to explore this struggle of young people with authorities.”

“I think the big problem of society is the structure of the family hat creates the next repressed person. I would like to explore these different experiences in all parts of society, family in particular.”