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PRODUCTION / FUNDING Italy

Leonora Addio is the new film by Paolo Taviani

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- The daring adventure of Luigi Pirandello's ashes and a crime story in 1930s Brooklyn are at the centre of the film selected in Competition at the Berlinale

Leonora Addio is the new film by Paolo Taviani
Matteo Pittiruti, Dania Marino and Dora Becker in Leonora Addio

Almost four years after the death of his brother Vittorio, with whom he had given life to an inseparable artistic partnership with international success in the 1960s, Paolo Taviani signs his second solo directing effort, after 2017's Rainbow - A Private Affair [+see also:
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trailer
interview: Paolo Taviani
film profile
]
. The new film is Leonora Addio [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Paolo Taviani
film profile
]
, a title that refers to the romance of Il Trovatore and has nothing to do with Luigi Pirandello's novella of the same name, but recounts the daring adventure of the ashes of the Nobel Prize for Literature winner in 1934, and the eventful journey of the urn from Rome to Agrigento, up to the tribulated burial fifteen years after his death. Leonora Addio has been selected for the next Berlin Film Festival as the only Italian film in competition.

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The film closes with the great Sicilian writer's last story, composed twenty days before his death on 10 December 1936: The Nail, in which the young Bastianeddu, snatched from his mother's arms in Sicily and forced to follow his father across the ocean to the United States, is unable to heal the wound that drives him to a senseless act. "The grotesque of the ashes tossed about by chance and of human stupidity seem to both have come out of Pirandello's pen: the paradox, the ridiculousness that slips into the absurd," explained Paolo Taviani. Just as absurd is the tragic fury of The Nail, the film's second story inspired by Pirandello's account of a news event in Brooklyn: 'a little girl killed by an Italian boy'. Here the truth of the news story will merge with another truth, that of the film.

The film, shot in Sicily and in the Cinecittà studios, stars Fabrizio Ferracane, Matteo Pittiruti, Dania Marino, Dora Becker and Claudio Bigagli. The script and screenplay were written by Paolo Taviani, with photography by Paolo Carnera and Simone Zampagni, editing by Roberto Perpignani, music by Nicola Piovani, costumes by Lina Nerli Taviani and set design by Emita Frigato.

Leonora Addio is produced by Donatella Palermo for Stemal Entertainment with Rai Cinema, in association with Luce Cinecittà and with Cinemaundici, with the support of Regione Siciliana - Assessorato Turismo Sport e Spettacolo - Sicilia Film Commission and the contribution of MIC - DG Cinema e Audiovisivo. It will be released in Italian cinemas on 17 February, immediately after its presentation in Berlin, distributed by 01 Distribution.

The Taviani brothers had participated in the Berlinale several times, from San Michele aveva un gallo, winner in the Forum section in 1972, to Caesar Must Die [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
film profile
]
, winner of the Golden Bear in 2012. The brothers' films have also been selected for Cannes (Padre Padrone, Palme d'Or in 1977, and The Night of San Lorenzo, Jury Grand Prix in 1982, among others) and Venice.

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(Translated from Italian by Manuela Lazic)

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