Pupi Avati closes Venice 81 out of competition with a gothic tale, a genre in which the director of Regalo di Natale excels since his beginnings (La casa dalle finestre che ridono, Zeder) and which he has frequented more recently with Il signor Diavolo. Like the latter, L’orto americano (produced by Minerva, DUEA and Rai Cinema) is based on a novel of the same name written by the filmmaker himself, a story that contains both historical and supernatural elements. The Hand of God’s Filippo Scotti (who won the Mastroianni Award for the movie directed by Paolo Sorrentino) is an aspiring writer who, in 1940s Bologna, falls in love with an American auxiliary. The cast also includes Rita Tushingham, a multi-award winner and unforgettable protagonist of Doctor Zhivago. ‘In the current proposal of a ‘return to the Gothic’, explains Avati, “with L’Orto Americano, we have dilated the boundaries by setting an initial portion of the story in the American Midwest and the subsequent part in that sort of Italian Midwest that is the great Po delta“. For the filmmaker, this is also the first feature film in which he sets the scene for the Italian post-World War II period, with the country still marked by hunger and the devastation of the conflict: ‘It is precisely this Italy reduced to rubble, in comparison with “reassuring” America, that will symbolically outline the mental discomfort that accompanies the narrator of our story‘.lang