"Riccardo Milani deals with important and necessary topics with noble lightness, irony and grace. He does not seek a forcibly aesthetic cinema, but a human cinema that speaks to human beings, in an honest and true way".
Thus Antonio Albanese in Pescasseroli talks about Un mondo a parte by Riccardo Milani in theaters from 28 March with Medusa in more than 500 theaters where he plays an elementary school teacher, Michele Cortese, who after forty years of teaching in Rome, manages to get assigned at the Cesidio Gentile Institute known as Jurico.
A school made up of a single multi-classroom, with children from seven to ten years old, in the heart of the Abruzzo National Park, a "world apart" where everything is possible without too much effort, including integration.
Here he meets the dynamic vice-principal Agnese (Virginia Raffaele) and, after a thousand setbacks, enters this truly 'separate' world of a small mountain town surrounded by snow, wolves, bears, eagles and syncopated dialect.
When everything seems to be going well, however, the news arrives that the school will close due to lack of enrolments.
Michele and Agnese will not give up, they will involve Ukrainian refugees with children, who have just arrived in Italy, and a Moroccan family to fill a class and prevent the school from closing.
The film was shot in the Abruzzo National Park and in Opi and Pescasseroli where last night a singular premiere was held at the Ettore Scola cinema complete with a band and a green carpet with bear footprints.
A large part of the country was present and, among other things, was part of the cast of A World Apart.
"I made a film that tries to look at my country to which I am attached even when I describe its worst aspects.
The important thing is to take a careful look at things we don't know. Here in these areas, integration is in the facts and walls can be overcome beyond ideologies", says Milani.
"I have never frequented the mountains - says Virginia Raffaele -, but in the case of this film I owe everything to the people I met in these places who created a real magic that changed me. So, to give just one example, in the weekend end I preferred to stay here rather than return to Rome. In the mountains you feel really comfortable among this rough but enveloping community."
Why a film right here in Abruzzo?
"Because this place has been a point of reference for me over the years - explains the director -. I came here by chance initially as a child and there was this fairy-tale aspect between animals and streams. And all this just 150 kilometers from Rome and, Above all, there was another way of facing life."
How do these places change you?
"Here you rediscover the silence, the good people, the kebabs, it also increases your cholesterol and you discover, once again, that Italy is the most beautiful country in the world", says Antonio Albanese finally.
Giampaolo Letta of Medusa talks about a "different promotion with a considered release date. This is a film in which the sense of community is strong, I hope it is clearly felt. We will thus do a territorial promotion with many previews for the schools to which we have also dedicated a site: Scuole@medusa.it Written by Milani, together with Michele Astori, Un mondo a parte is produced by Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Gangarossa for Wildside, a Fremantle group company, in association with Medusa Film.
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