Respiro
Breath
by
MOVIE CATEGORY
Lampedusa, in a suspended world: Grazia, mother of three children, wants to feel free. She swims, laughs, rolls up in her husband Pietro’s fishing nets, roams between rocky beaches and immaculate caves. But the world around her doesn’t understand why she isn’t used to freedom, and the thought that she is suffering from delusions of depression makes its way more and more, together with her husband’s discomfort.
The second movie directed by Emanuele Crialese, one of his most famous work, is a hymn to the freedom to be enigmatic, incomprehensible, unique. The landscape of the Sicilian island is a mirror of the beauty of Grazia, played by an exceptional Valeria Golino, but it is also the theatre of sharp and painful existential clashes. An uncatchable siren, a borderline figure, Grazia is an emblem of desire, and even if the worlds makes her spin “come fosse una bambola”, Patti Pravo would say, her mind and her thoughts are hers only.
DIRECTORY
Italian director that has worked since the end of the Nineties, Emanuele Crialese was born in Rome to Sicilian parents in 1965, and studied Cinema first in Rome and then at New York University. His debut, Once We Were Strangers (1997), was set in New York, while his most successful films, Respiro (2002) and Nuovomondo (2006), returned to Sicilian lands. The latter was presented at the Venice Film Festival, awarded with the unprecedented Silver Lion for Revelation of the year, and nominated for the Oscars, the David di Donatello and the European Film Awards. Terraferma was awarded in Venice as well in 2011, and his last film, L’immensità (2022), was again selected at the Lido in the main competition.
