ITALY
Paolo Sorrentino’s autobiographical drama The Hand of God has been selected by Italy as its contender for best international feature film at the upcoming Academy Awards.
Sorrentino’s story of a goofy yet sensitive boy named Fabietto who starts harboring a passion for filmmaking in the tumultuous Naples of the late 1980s.
The film launched at the Venice Film Festival where it was a two-time winner, taking the runner-up grand jury prize as well as the Marcello Mastroianni Award for best young actor for 21-year-old lead Filippo Scotti, who plays Fabietto.
Picture is produced by Fremantle’s Italian outfit The Apartment for Netflix, which will release the film theatrically in Italy on Nov. 24, followed by limited releases in theaters globally on December 3 and a launch on the platform on Dec. 15.
The story is a deeply personal one to Sorrentino, who won the Best Foreign Language Oscar for The Great Beauty in 2014.
In 2015, he revealed, “Aside from all the things I’ve said before about Maradona, he involuntarily saved my life. I lost my parents when I was 16 in an accident with the heating system in a house in the mountains, where I always used to go to with them. That weekend, I didn’t go because I wanted to go watch Maradona and S.S.C Napoli play a match in Empoli, and that saved me.”
