Piccola patria
by Alessandro Rosetto // Italy
Piccola patria recontextualizes violence, betrayal, love, faith and dissimulation in a complex, although sometimes excessively electic discourse. Alessandro Rosetto’s first fiction featurer shapes an expected spectrum of human relationships surprised in a small provincial town, that becomes a character in itself. Known as a documentary and anthrosophy-oriented director, his approach explores human interactions in a nonfiction way, while exploring improvisation and observation as a core-elements in the filmmaking process, one of the most valuable merits of the film. The “small hometown� is an hermetic space with its own cinematic journey: at first a distant erotic playground, but as we are immersed into the story we discover the inner dimensions and the backgrounds of the ones involved. Although we follow multiple characters in a blend of interactions, aiming to leave the town one day, the plot focuses on uninhibited Louisa teasing her Albanian boyfriend, Bilal, while having an upredictable relationship with mysterious Renata. As the film tries to unravel the inflationary relationships of the charNisimazine Yearbook 2013 // 78 // review by Ioana Mischie
acters and the consequences of their actions, it becomes rather difficult to empathize or to identify a constant protagonist. The cinematic narrative has a rather amateur-inspired approach, interrupted almost in a Brecht-ian way by ensemble plans of the town heightened by classical music, that appear as a demiurgical discourse, contextualizing every individual story into an universal collective one. Everything is based on an yin-yang of contrasts: inhibition-openmindedness, innocence-sin, life-death, individual-community. Rossetto conceives his film almost as a Rubik cube, teasing the audience and offering possibilities of matches between the characters, their attitudes and progressive shifts. For this reason, it requires time and patience to be digested. Some audiences might consider it overwhelmingly incoherent, but others extremely provocative.