Cloro (Chlorine)
Description
Living in Ostia, a seaside suburb of Rome, 17-year-old Jenny is a talented synchronized swimmer. After her mother dies and her father has a nervous breakdown, the family relocates to a mountain village in the Abruzzo region where Jenny looks after her little brother Fabrizio and gets a job at a local hotel. Trying to make the best of circumstances beyond her control, she dreams of returning to Ostia and competing with her friends while beginning a tentative flirtation with the hotel’s Yugoslavian caretaker, Ivan. Director Lamberto Sanfelice’s potent coming-of-age story details the difficulties of his protagonist’s life with care and precision, avoiding melodrama and employing an intimate style reminiscent of the Dardenne brothers. With a memorably defined sense of place and a terrific performance by Sara Serraiocco, who invests her character with a memorable combination of timidity and fearlessness, Cloro delicately tracks how traumatic change can lead to newfound maturity.
Trailer
Biographies
Lamberto Sanfelice directed several highly regarded short films before making his first feature. The script for Cloro was selected for the Mediterranean Film Institute Script 2 Film Workshop. Speaking about the film, he says, “Cloro is about an uprooting. The contrast between sea and mountain is the two worlds in which Jenny is living; one where fate brought her and the other where she would like to be.”