Fandango launches at the Venice Film Festival the international distribution of Oceans Are the Real Continents, the first feature film by Tommaso Santambrogio, which opens Giornate degli Autori, the festival’s independent section. The film is a Rosamont production with Rai Cinema, in co-production with Cacha Films, produced by Marica Stocchi and Gianluca Arcopinto and will be in theatres from 31 August.
Against the backdrop of the most important migratory phenomenon Cuba is experiencing at the moment, the film tells the story of the relationship of a couple in their thirties, Alex and Edith, “made of small gestures and tenderness among the ruins of Cuban buildings,” the synopsis says. The choice to shoot the film in black and white, emphasizes the narrative of those gestures and those of the other characters: Milagros, an elderly retired woman who survives by selling peanut cones on the street and spends her days listening to the radio and reading old letters; Frank and Alain, two friends of nine years, who dream of emigrating to the United States to become Major League Baseball players.
Separation, for those who leave and those who stay, is a feeling Cuban society lives with, and Santambrogio felt the force of it from the very first moment: “The first time I went to Cuba I was eight years old. As I approached customs, I remember witnessing a desperate and interminable embrace-with deep sobs and tears-between a father and his daughter who had evidently found a way to leave the island and would never return.”
For the director, the episode represents the foundation stone in the construction of the subject; he himself calls that memory “a moment that became fixed in my memory and eventually made a connection between today’s Cuba and my artistic research.”
Photo credits: Filmitalia
