ADAGIO
Italy 2023, Director Stefano Sollima Starring Pierfrancesco Favino, Toni Servillo, Valerio Mastandrea, Adriano Giannini, Gianmarco Franchini, Francesco Di Leva, Lorenzo Adorni, Silvia Salvatori Running time 127′ Distribution Vision Distribution
“I am eager and excited to finally return to reporting on my city after all these years. Rome has changed, and so have I. I have observed it with different eyes, walking its streets with a different step. Adagio is a crepuscular story of revenge and redemption, just right to be the last chapter of my Roman crime trilogy”. Stefano Sollima comes back to Italy after directing the U.S.-made films Soldado (sequel to Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario) in 2018 and Without Remorse (based on Tom Clancy’s 1993 novel of the same name) in 2021 and creating and directing the Italian-French-U.S. TV miniseries ZeroZeroZero (2020).
Sollima first success was in 2008, when he made the television series Romanzo criminale for Sky. In 2012, he made his big-screen debut with the film A.C.A.B. – All Cops Are Bastards, nominated for six David di Donatello and five Nastri d’Argento, with Pierfrancesco Favino and Marco Giallini winning the Nastro for best leading actor and best supporting actor. Also in 2012, he directed, together with Francesca Comencini and Claudio Cupellini, the first season of Gomorra, a television adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s novel, produced by Sky Italia, Cattleya and Fandango. In 2015, he released his second feature film on contemporary criminal Rome: Suburra, which collected six David and seven Nastri nominations, with Greta Scarano winning for best supporting actress (as well as the Ciak d’Oro revelation of the year, shared with Alessandro Borghi) and Paki Meduri the Ribbon for set design.
Adagio now concludes the crime trilogy started with A.C.A.B. – All Cops Are Bastards and continued with Suburra and starts with an ambitious premise for Sollima: “In this film, I tell the inexorable, poignant decline of three old legends of criminal Rome in search of an impossible redemption. But there is a glimmer of light: the new generation….” A dystopian film about a Rome surrounded by fires looming over the capital, it recounts the tragic chain of events in which Manuel, a 16-year-old boy who tries to enjoy life as much as he can while caring for his elderly father (Toni Servillo), finds himself caught up. The boy is the victim of blackmail and must go to a party to take some photos of a mysterious individual. Fearing that he has been tricked, he decides to run away but is pursued by the blackmailers (Adriano Giannini, Francesco Di Leva and Lorenzo Adorni), who are determined to eliminate what they believe to be an inconvenient witness. Manuel realizes he is embroiled in something bigger than himself and is forced to seek protection from two ex-criminals, old acquaintances of his father (Valerio Mastandrea and Pierfrancesco Favino).
