16/06/2022 - The second chapter in Emanuele Mengotti’s trilogy on the American West depicts the first days of lockdown in Las Vegas, flitting between doctors, deniers and homeless people

In 2020, Venice-born director Emanuele Mengotti took part in the Biografilm Festival by way of West of Babylonia, which was shot in the Californian desert and revolves around a diverse community of people determined to live outside of American society’s rules. This year, Mengotti is presenting the second chapter of his trilogy dedicated to the American West, Red Sky At Night, in a world premiere within the Biografilm Italy section of the very same Bologna-based festival. The film is wholly shot in Las Vegas in the days following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and it revolves around three characters who each embody the stereotypical American in different ways - all while the threat of biblical rain hangs over this city nestled in the Nevada desert.

At the time, US resident Mengotti found himself in “sin city” - a symbol of the American Dream - and was planning to shoot a documentary about the American elections of 2020 when the pandemic struck and turned everyone’s lives upside down. The first scenes in the documentary are like something straight out of The Twilight Zone: the casino lights are still flashing, loudspeakers continue to broadcast their announcements but there isn’t a soul on the streets. “What do you mean I can’t go to work?”, an Elvis lookalike dressed up to the nines with freshly glued-on sideburns asks a police officer. It’s at this point that Mengotti introduces us to the film’s three main characters: there’s Steve, who lives with his partner in the drainage system beneath the city, in a tunnel looking out onto the glittering buildings of Las Vegas, and whose biggest worry isn’t so much the pandemic as the imminent rain which threatens to flood the makeshift shelter he’s only just painted; there’s Mike, a tireless doctor who fights on the front line during the health crisis, taking swab after swab in car parks and informing people about the precautions they need to take, while the number of positive cases continues to rise; and then there’s super blond Mindy, a former B-list movie actress now fully engaged in an electoral campaign as an aspiring candidate of Nevada’s Republican Party, who’s also fanatical about weapons and a spokesperson for anyone who sees lockdown as an assault on personal freedom and a call for a second civil war.

With slot machines gobbling up money, streets full of the destitute who have been left to their own devices and rabble-rousers shouting “don’t believe the media!”, “let’s save the country from tyranny!”, “it’s all the fault of the communists”, in just under an hour, Mengotti manages to convey the multiple facets of this contradictory and unsettling American society simply by observing it, demonstrating an extraordinary ability to capture meaningful images while allowing them to speak for themselves. Amidst a crescendo of rising protests from Trump’s followers, as the sky above Las Vegas turns increasingly leaden and ominous and doomsayers of all kinds quote passages from the bible, predicting the Apocalypse – and while Mike continues to try to save human lives, placing his faith in science – Red Sky At Night is a precious and incisive testimony about the atmosphere which prevailed during the first few days of the pandemic in this region of American and how it ended several months later in the infamous and senseless assault on Capitol Hill.

Red Sky At Night is an Italian/American co-production, led by Le Talee and Smoke & Mirrors, in collaboration with Rai Cinema.

(Translated from Italian)