I Love Italian Everything

HUMAN CAPITAL / IL CAPITALE UMANO Italy (108 min)

Director: Paolo Virzi
Screenwriter: Francesco Piccolo, Francesco Bruni, Paolo Virzì
Producer: Fabrizio Donvito, Marco Cohen, Benedetto Habib, Philippe Gompel, Birgit Kemner
Director of Photography: Jérôme Alméras
Editor: Cecilia Zanuso
Production Design: Mauro Radaelli
Costume Design: Bettina Pontiggia
Original Score: Carlo Virzì
Sound Design: Roberto Mozzarelli
Main Cast: Fabrizio Gifuni, Luigi Lo Cascio, Valeria Golino, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Fabrizio Bentivoglio

 

FROM THE EFA WEBSITE

Synopsis

During a cold winter night, a cyclist is hit by a SUV and then abandoned to agonize in the frozen snow. The mysterious episode, on which the police will investigate, connects the events of the members of two families: the petty-bourgeois family of Ossola and the rich and venerated one of Bernaschi. Through a sophisticated narration divided into four chapters, adapted by an American noir novel, the film explores human and inhuman ambitions, generational conflicts and social splendour and misery of a North Italian province, ending with a mocking flavour epilogue that does not seem to fulfill anybody.

 

Director’s Statement

This project began first and foremost as a real ‘love affair’ with the wonderful novel by Stephen Amidon, “Human Capital”, set in an affluent Connecticut suburb in the last decade. Those characters, and that story, seemed emblematic of our times, even in Italy: a wealth that doesn’t come from work, but from the most ruthless of financial speculation; the dashed hopes of climbing the social ladder; the anxiety that money causes; a generation of young people forced to pay a higher price for happiness, because of the fitful ambitions of their parents, or their own frustrations. The story of Drew Hagel – the restless real estate agent who takes advantage of his daughter’s presumed relationship with the son of a wealthy broker to try and join the board of an aggressive investment fund – immediately struck a chord. It seemed written just for us, to express a state of affairs that concerns us all.

 

So we made it an Italian story, the story of Dino Ossola, a real estate agent in hot water, who’s enrolled his daughter Serena in a prestigious prep school he can barely afford. We immersed that mosaic of stories and characters in a Northern Italian province of today, a place straddling the border of wealth and desperation. We decided to structure the plot like a real thriller, with a dead body on our hands from the very first scene: a cyclist hit on an icy winter’s night, on the eve of the Christmas holidays. Tracing the steps of the various characters, the entire film re-tells the story of what happened that night, piece by piece, showing how that accident could change each of their lives.
Mainly, however, it tells the story of how money – the angst of multiplying it, the anxiety of losing it – determines the relationships, the fates, and the worth of the people it touches.