Pio Amato, left, with family members in “A Ciambra,” a film featuring nonprofessional actors playing versions of themselves. Credit Sundance Selects Sometimes at night, Pio (Pio Amato), a 14-year-old Roma boy living on the rough edge of the southern Italian town of Gioia Tauro, sees the specter of his grandfather’s horse wandering the streets. It goes without saying that Gioia Tauro, a beaten-down zone of poverty and petty crime, is no place for such a noble animal. Jan 17, 2018 Pio Amato, left, with family members in “A Ciambra,” a film featuring nonprofessional actors playing versions of themselves. Credit Sundance Selects. A Ciambra is a 2017 Italian drama film directed by Jonas Carpignano. It was screened in the Directors' Fortnight section at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. “When we were on the road, we were free,” says Pio’s grandfather — glimpsed as a young man in a brief opening scene — who watches his descendants struggle to hold onto the old ways of their wandering, proudly ungovernable kind. Video Trailer: 'A Ciambra'. Advertisement The story, which emerges slowly through the warmth and noise of Pio’s daily life, leads him toward a wrenching moment of moral crisis. In its mood and methods, “A Ciambra” pays homage to the work of, the living masters of European realist cinema. Like the protagonists in their films, Pio faces an ethical dilemma created as much by his own misjudgments as by the harshness of his circumstances. He is forced to decide, before he is ready and at enormous potential cost, what kind of person he wants to be. I hesitate to say too much more, since like the Dardennes (and like their great precursor, Robert Bresson), Mr. Carpignano uses the character’s agonizing choice as a way to create suspense. “A Ciambra,” which numbers Martin Scorsese among its executive producers, shows some of his influence as well, in its depiction of crime as a family business and in its attention to masculine codes of loyalty, violence and respect. The most frequent visitors to Ciambra are the police and the gangsters known locally as “the Italians,” who come to dispense assignments and collect payment.
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March 2018
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