L'Arminuta, a girl between modernity and the rural world

 A great film, the only Italian wanted by Antonio Monda in the official selection, full of echoes, from the brilliant friend to the aesthetics of Ermanno Olmi and the Taviani brothers, and with the bestselling novel by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, winner of the Award. Campiello 2017. L'ARMINUTA by Giuseppe Bonito is a small jewel, which went today to the Rome Film Festival and in cinemas from 21 October with Lucky Red, announced among the 18 films among which the Italian film to be designated for the international Oscar nomination. 

A lean, essential film with an exceptional cast, which takes us back to the summer of 1975.

A delicate, sensitive and well-educated thirteen-year-old girl, the Arminuta (Sofia Fiore), or in the Abruzzese dialect 'the return', is returned to her real family to which she did not know she belonged. And so suddenly he passes from a bourgeois, well-to-do environment to a rural family, simple, poor and of few words who live in a farm lost in nowhere. A family made up of a severe father (Fabrizio Ferracane), a sad mother (Vanessa Scalera) and three brothers who could not be more different, including the sweet little Adriana (Carlotta De Leonardis) and Vincenzo (Andrea Fuorto), a restless teenager and with a quick hand.

What happens to the young Arminuta is impossible to reveal without making spoilers. But what is certain is that the girl, particularly gifted intellectually, will have to adapt to a peasant environment without education and above all deal with the family to which she had been entrusted and who at a certain point refused her. "Suddenly she loses everything that had characterized her life: a comfortable home, her closest friends, the exclusive affection reserved for those who are an only child - says the director, in the third film after FLEAS and CHILDREN -. She finds herself catapulted. in a new, strange and rude world that seems barely touched by progress and having to share the space of a small and dark house with five other brothers in a sometimes hostile and promiscuous dimension. In this story everything is highly polarized:the seaside town and the hinterland town, modernity and archaicity, bourgeois well-being and rural poverty, correct Italian as it is spoken on TV and the narrow dialect spoken in the new house. And in the middle there is her, the Arminuta, who is always both together, the daughter of two mothers and none. No one seems to be able or willing to answer the questions that haunt her.No one seems to be able or willing to answer the questions that haunt her.No one seems to be able or willing to answer the questions that haunt her.

Why was it returned?

Why was she given away when she was born? ".

Vanessa Scalera, sad mother of Arminuta says instead:" How did I come to make this character?

Simple, after observing in reality those mothers who have a lump in their eyes that never explodes.

I came to terms with those eyes, eyes that express everything but never speak. "L'ARMINUTA is an Italian-Swiss co-production: Roberto Sbarigia for Maro Film, Maurizio and Manuel Tedesco for Baires Produzioni, Javier Krause for Kaf with Rai Cinema .