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SFFILM Festival

South Is Nothing

Directed by Fabio Mollo

Italy/France | 90

3 May
Sat, May 3, 2014 at 8:30 pm PT
More tickets may be available during Daily Noon Ticket Releases—check this page for updates. If space is available, rush tickets will be released at showtime to those in the standby line. We recommend arriving 30-60 minutes before showtime for rush tickets.

Description

It’s not a spoiler to reveal that, despite appearances, the amazing kid at the center of this very particular coming-of-age tale, set in a small fishing village across the Strait of Messina from Sicily, is a girl. Why 17-year-old Grazia (Miriam Karlkvist) has taken on an androgynous physique is one of the film’s sustaining mysteries. Is Grazia manning up as she wishes her father, Cristiano, a fishmonger, would do against the local mafia who are forcing him out of business? Or is she a replacement son following the presumed death of her beloved older brother Pietro? Anger at the silence around Pietro’s disappearance leads Grazia to her own magical-real conclusions; he his nowhere and appears everywhere. Director Fabio Mollo, shooting in his native Reggio Calabria, doesn’t define the territory so much as abstract and defamiliarize it, for example, in a religious festival where silent townsmen parading the altar become a tragic and threatening unity. In such oblique ways we sense more than learn what Cristiano, his son and now his daughter are up against. The code of silence—a form of nihilism, the “nothing” of the film’s title—is what the girl must shatter in order to live as herself. –Judy Bloch

Director Fabio Mollo

“I like to think of myself as a storyteller more than anything,” Fabio Mollo says. His style of storytelling, however, is both understated and distinctly visual. Born in Reggio Calabria in 1980, he studied visual theory in London and film directing in Rome. He returned to his native southern Italy to make South Is Nothing, his first feature, and for the short film The Giant (2007), which served as an exploratory work for the feature film and which won numerous prizes.

Film Details

Language Italian

Original Language Title Il sud è niente

Year 2013

Runtime 90

Country Italy/France

Director Fabio Mollo

Producer Jean Denis Le Dinahet, Sebastien Msika

Writer Fabio Mollo, Josella Porto

Editor Filippo Montemurro

Cinematographer Debora Vrizzi

Music Giorgio Giampà

Cast Miriam Karlkvist, Vinicio Marchioni, Valentina Lodovini