“Stray animals never return to the same place: even if you feed them, they always wander around.”
This is the key phrase of Stray Animals, a film by Maria Tilli which tells of a bored provincial world, on the margins, currently in competition at the Bif&st in the ItaliaFilmFest 2024 New Italian cinema section.
The protagonists are Luca (Andrea Lattanzi) and Toni (Giacomo Ferrara), two boys who live in this small town amidst a thousand repeated annoyances and the use of narcotics for a short escape.
The two, who have always been friends, work together as paramedics in an ambulance.
One day Luca and Toni are asked to transport a patient out of Italy because he needs unspecified treatment.
The man is called Emir (Ivan Franek) and asks them to return to his Serbia.
For this trip, however, he also wants Maria (Agnese Claisse), the daughter he hasn't seen for several years, with him.
It is immediately clear that there isn't a great relationship between them, that they haven't seen each other much, but Emir now seems driven to reconcile with this girl as if he no longer had time.
Meanwhile Luca and Toni see this new mission of theirs almost as a trip, a holiday.
During the journey, however, they will discover that the care Emir needs hides much more and so they will have to deal with a reality that they had tried to avoid until then.
"This film was born first and foremost from my personal emotional experience - says the director of this feature film produced by Eagle Original Content with Rai Cinema -. It is a provincial story born even from the smallest things told in the town bar after two in the morning. It is initially set in a place where every day is the same as the previous one, made up of semi-deserted industrial areas, emptied historic centers and an artificial lake that originates at the foot of a dam. In this monotony and apathy, unfortunately, the only entertainment or main pastime are alcohol and drugs".
And again Maria Tilli: "The characters are two thirty-year-olds of today, the generation that lives at home with their parents and that doesn't believe in the future; they are amoral and unscrupulous. When the two have the opportunity to escape from the monotony, with a trip beyond the national border, they immediately accept; not to escape and start a new life, but only to transgress, to move the limit of boredom a little further. Stray Animals also talks about freedom of choice, about how our freedom of action is reflected on others. It is a delicate story - he concludes - about the pain we feel when we have to accept and come to terms with the decisions of someone we love. Throughout the film there is a suspended climate, behind which, however, , death is hidden. A luminous, tender death, thanks to which broken emotional threads are reunited, broken family ties, loves that, perhaps,
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