(ANSA) - VENICE, 02 SEPT - It was the hand of God, Paolo Sorrentino's admittedly personal, intimate, autobiographical film in which he retraces his adolescence in Naples with so much love and as much pain with the loss of his parents at 16, is different from all his previous ones such as history, setting, cinematic style. The film of the turn? "I was here in Venice 20 years ago with my first film, Man in Plus, played by Toni Servillo (who plays his father here instead (ed), I like to think that this is a new beginning", the director tells ANSA A film in which great courage comes to terms with his past marked precisely by that tragedy after which he understood better what dagrande wanted to do, namely cinema and move to Rome.
"It took more courage to write it than to do it, because on the set, even if there were exciting moments, there are choices and practical problems that save you and make you almost completely overcome your fears. I have decided now - continues the award. Oscar for La Grande Bellezza - perhaps because I am the right age, the one in which the balances are made, I turned 50, and all that love lived and all that pain could be declined in a cinematic story, I felt in short enough old or mature to face it ".
In the story, the young actor Filippo Scotti is Fabietto, the director's alter ego, "with the same shyness, inadequacy that I remembered having as a boy". Toni Servillo and Teresa Saponangelo interpret his parents, "he did not ask us to be faithful but to remember them as a couple very much in love", explains Servillo who since the beginning of the twenty-year collaboration with Sorrentino was predestined sooner or later to play the parent (" promised: 'when I find the right distance' you will be my father in a film that sooner or later I will do ", remembers Servillo).
Produced by Lorenzo Mieli and Paolo Sorrentino, a The Apartment production, a company of the Fremantle group, It was the hand of God will be released in selected cinemas on November 24 and on Netflix on December 15, 2021. (ANSA).