(from Rome Luigi Noera with the kind collaboration of Stefano Sica and Valentina Vignoli – The photos are published courtesy of the Fondazione Cinema peri Roma)

From the GRAND PUBLIC section: HUNDRED SUNDAYS by Antonio Albanese, Italy, 2022, 94’ who surprises everyone with this gray-toned film

The Latin term insomnia refers not to lack of sleep but to lack of dreams. Antonio Riva, the protagonist of this contemporary social drama, he set aside his life savings for a particular purpose: organize your daughter's wedding.

Divorced, with a lover who is married, Antonio lives with his elderly mother and spends his days doing menial jobs in the black and playing bowls with his classmates. Upon hearing the news of her daughter's engagement, he goes to the bank ready to redeem a sum sufficient for the wedding, practically all the savings put aside. He thus discovers that he has spent the last few years investing in shares. Stocks or bonds? The boundary between the two terms blurs. The bank is going through a rough patch but nothing to worry about, you have to stay calm...

Antonio's savings, as well as those of many other Italians, they are no longer his. Sundays spent working, more than a hundred of those Sundays, they no longer belong to the worker with sweat-stained hands. The last will remain the last, while the richest, the most "armed", they knew ahead of time what was going to happen and pocketed the money.

Antonio Albanese surprises everyone with this gray-toned film that stages one of the most shameful forms of betrayal. There is no shortage of explanations, poorly written jokes that interrupt the fluidity of the narrative flow. It has to be said, But, that Albanese manages to immerse us in this gray scale, slowly, initially capturing the viewer through irony, and once caught, thrown into the gravity of the drama. And it's a drama that gets inside us and makes us sick to our stomachs, especially because Antonio Riva is just one of many.

Giulia Lazzarini's interpretation is worthy of note and amuses us, enchants and moves.

It's hard not to think of the opening film of the Rome Film Festival, There's Still Tomorrow by Paola Cortellesi. In Albanese's film, as in that of Cortellesi, the daughter's marriage is central to the narrative. The true, the protagonist's great dream is also his economic responsibility, that no one can take away from him: it is up to the father to pay for his daughter's wedding. When the lack of money prevents him from fulfilling his role as a father, he feels the world collapsing around him. We see a male who does not know how to react when faced with the impossibility of fulfilling this "social" task of his, familiar. And it is a portrait that makes us reflect a lot on current events, especially now that accompanying this vision there are many female directors who show us the counterpart.