The film L’Arminuta by Giuseppe Bonito at the Theocharakis Foundation

With a special film, L’Arminuta by award-winning director Giuseppe Bonito, which will be screened with free admission on Wednesday 02 November (8.30pm) at the Theocharakis Foundation, under the auspices of the Italian and Swiss Embassies, marks this year’s celebration of the 22nd week of the Italian Language in the World.

The film, whose screenplay is based on the book of the same name and awarded with the distinguished literary prize Campiello (2017), book by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, which is a distinct Bildungsroman, a book of coming of age and gradual integration into real life, focuses on a girl’s enigmatic return to her natural family in the 1970s. After all, the title Arminuta means “she who returns” in the dialect of the mountainous Abruzzi, where the 13-year-old girl arrives to be reunited with her real family, her natural mother, her five–literally new–siblings. An unexpected and sudden return, which remains throughout the length and width of the film enigmatic, like many other elements in the novel: from her true name Arminuta, of her mother, some of her siblings, the reasons that forced the return, but also the original reason for her adoption. The protagonist of Efni is forced to face a lifestyle she is not used to, socialize with relatives with whom she has no common experiences, live in a mountain town, which has nothing to do with the coastal place she grew up, to communicate in a dialect which does not resemble the official Italian he knows.

The whole plot of the movie, like the book, it rests precisely on this opposition, which creates a relation of Otherness and otherness to things, even though it unfolds within a psychological framework of the “disturbingly familiar” (Unheimlich), where everything is recognizable and at the same time uncomfortable, that can be seductive and at the same time terrifying . Arminuta wanders relentlessly between memory and the present, alienation and familiarity, the comfort, love and affection she left behind and the stark realism, leavened with the new relationships of warmth and friendship she builds, in what she left behind and what he has to face. And in fact, at an age of 13, which, both in a symbolic and in a real context, is both the milestone of the end of childhood and the springboard for adult life. It is the qualitative boundary for the questions and empirical knowledge that open up to man, the threshold on which the rest of his life unfolds.

The theme of the movie and the book one can well say that it is deeply allegorical and if it wants to extend beyond the literary horizon and in the context of everyday life and historical time, topical. The loss of the elements that made up the ‘security’ of Arminuta’s previous life, can easily be radiated and transferred to the situation of, for example, an immigrant or a refugee–who, although he does not return as a guy to a family he never met–is shared with the protagonist the trauma of losing his past situation, the home he grew up in, his habits and diving into a world with difficulties of adaptation, new customs, new demands and often harsh treatment, despite the possibility of adaptation that is open to him. Or even more, of an everyday person, who the economic crisis has forced to throw away the comfort of his previous life and has forced him to travel to a new, uncharted, everyday life, in which he had not been trained, nor had he ever thought about and which many times he is unable to cope. A situation with ups and downs, with love and hate, with successes and disappointments.

The cycle of a year as a time frame in the narration of this film (and the book, for that matter) leaves open all possibilities for the conclusion of this strange return, which the timelessness of a narrative could combine in an ending– indifferently good or bad. However, the questions it raises and leaves to the viewer to solve are crucial and both their core and their intensity are eternal and feedback. The imposingness of the scenes and their narrative austerity and suggestiveness allow this mysteriousness to be strongly erased and the questions to emerge. Elements that constantly arouse the interest of the viewer and enhance the seduction and concentration in the rhythm of the film.

Bonito’s film, the third after the Special Jury Prize winner at the Rome Film Festival “Pulce non c’e'” and “Figli” (Silver Film for Best Comedy), manages to straighten out the troubled relationship it creates the sudden detachment from certainty and the immersion in an unknown, which you will have to understand and adapt from the beginning.

“L’ Arminuta”, film by Giuseppe Bonito, screening Wednesday 2 November, 8.30 pm, Theocharakis Foundation, Vas. Sofias 9 & Merlin, Free entrance

RES-EMP

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