Projects
The Night Burns
Massimo and his friends steal jewels and valuables at concerts by spraying pepper spray.
Massimo and his friends are twenty-year-olds from the provinces, who spend their days stuffing themselves with drugs. Once darkness falls, driven by easy money and a thirst for adrenaline, they wander around the discos spreading panic with pepper spray, to rob people while protected by the confusion. One night, something goes wrong. The mad crowd is unable to flow out of the club and people end up trampling each other, causing several injuries and a boy in a coma. The event breaks the fragile balance of the gang, disintegrating it and driving the boys away. It seems like this is Massimo’s last chance to change his life and escape the vile existence he was leading. He will in fact find a new love, an honest job, and paradoxically he will become friends with the victim’s mother. Will he finally become aware of the harm he has done?
The film is inspired by a real story that happened in Italy, and from this tragic event I wanted to investigate the life of these young criminals, trying to immerse myself in their existences to tell the story of that terrible night in the disco. I tried to erase the gap between reality and fiction, to push myself beyond the limits of conventional narration and lead the viewer into facts that the media tend to represent as distant from the public, in an attempt to reassure them. It is a small world in which the protagonists want to live “small”, where the same rules always exist and there are no ways out, because the essential crux on which the film is based is the fear of not being able to face the present, of not finding a space, even a tiny one, in which to exist and not be crushed by the blows of an often indifferent society.
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