Under 30 and on their way up.
The Berlinale has its shooting stars and we have ours.
Blu Yoshimi (Di Martino)
Nanni Moretti lovers will remember Blu Yoshimi from his movie Caos Calmo, playing Nanni’s daughter. When his wife died, he wanted hate being away from his little girl so much that he sat on a park bench every day outside her classroom window when she was at school, even conducting business meetings there.
Blu was amazingly talented at that young age, and still is at age 19. As Cate, the pregnant teenager in Roan Johnson’s Piuma, she is absolutely perfect, overwhelmed and yet calm and resolved in her unfortunate circumstances. She is on my list of actresses to watch, and I can’t wait to see her in the upcoming English language film, The Banality of Crime.
Ondina Quadri
At just 22, Ondina is a naturally gifted actress who, her first time out, won the Italian Golden Globe for Best Actress and Best Actress in a Debut Film at the Venice Film Festival. Even though she’d never acted before, she took on the difficult role of Arianna, the Intersex teenager who’d been assigned the female gender and never told about it.
Daphne Scoccia
Getting chosen for the role in Fiori, Claudio Giovannesi’s film about a teenage girl in a juvenile detention center was “destiny”, according to 21-year-old Daphne Scoccia. Giovannesi, at lunch with producers at a restaurant in Rome, noticed their pretty waiter and asked her if she wanted to do an audition.
“Why not?” she thought, and “Thank goodness!” I say, because she’s a revelation in the role (and she’s gorgeous; she has “celebrity” written all over her.
The Fontana Sisters
Fame: twins Angela and Marianna Fontana want it and they are going to get it. Beautiful, multi-talented, and a spectacular screen presence, they are singers that caught the eye of director Edoardo De Angelis for the role of conjoined twins who could easily have been separated at birth, the their parents figured out that they could make a buck off them left intact. At Venice Film Festival debut of the film debut of Indivisibili, the girls won a Best Actress Special Mention, the Pasinetti Prize.
Laura Adriani
Laura Adriana is only 22 but seems years older in terms of experience and talent. I first noticed her as the precocious teenage Emma in Paolo Genovese’s Tutta Colpa di Freud and was even more impressed with her as Angela in Giuseppe Piccioni’s ‘Questi Giorni’.
Michele Vannucci
Let’s add a guy into the mix, and a director, instead of an actor; Michele Vannucci is talented way beyond his years, and he’s too young to be so smart. Honestly, I look at Michele and I think, “What the hell have I done with my life?” He’s not even 30 and he’s crafted a true piece of art in his first feature film Il Più Grande Sogno.
I Love Italian Everything 