Italy

LA GUERRA DI MARIO

CREDITS 

35mm - Colore - 100’

Direction: Antonio Capuano
Screenplay: Antonio Capuano
Photography: Luca Bigazzi
Editing: Giorgio Franchini
Musics: Pasquale Catalano
Setting: Lino Fiorito
Costumes: Daniela Ciancio
Effects: Guido Pappadà
Cast: Valeria Golino, Marco Grieco, Andrea Renzi, Anita Caprioli, Rosaria De Cicco, Antonio Pennarella, Valeria Sabel, Lucia Ragni, Imma Villa, Nunzio Gallo, Emanuale Annunziata
Production: Domenico Procacci, Francesca Cima e Nicola Giuliano per Fandango, Indigo Film, Medusa Film, SKY
Distribution: Medusa

SYNOPSIS

In order to defend him from abuses and mistreatments, the Juvenile Court takes Mario, a nine-year-old child, away from his family
and assigns him temporarilily to an unmarried forty-year-old couple, Giulia and Sandro, belonging to the upper middle-class, who had been longing to adopt a difficult child for a long time. Giulia feels at ease as a mother, while Sandro is worried for the new situation and the reality he has to face. Mario suddendly finds in an unknown world in which the new parents spoil him, consenting to all his desires. In this golden cage, Mario feels so lonely and not understood that he refuges in an imaginary world inspired to a video-game and ruled by a chivalrous code. To this magic world only his two new friend are admitted: a stray dog and a school fellow. When the former dies knocked down by a car and the latter leaves school to move to another town, Mario becomes gloomy and depressed. Giulia, who meanwhile has got pregnant, goes on in complying him, until....

CRITICAL NOTES

(...)It was necessary to emphasize especially Valeria Golino’s interpretation, a real actress who has been following for years an ambitious, important route.(...)" (Tullio Kezich)
"One of the best Italian films with an excellent Valeria Golino for emotional extent and intensity, whose face expresses every nuance, every ambivalence. (...) it is a film that involves us and is not rethoric, showing the inadequacy of laws facing the human and inhuman factors. If it was broadcated on a TV prime time it would have a great audience. Trust me." (Maurizio Porro)

AWARDS

Valeria Golino David di Donatello 2006 as Best Leading Actress
Locarno (2005) special mention for the interpretation to Marco Grieco