Is conspiracy pure madness or can it be a way to identify real situations, harmful to the community? This is the question of “The conspiracy artist”work before Valerio Ferraraon tour in theaters with Piperfilm after the presentation in competition in Alice in the city (Rome Film Festival). An Italian comedy of the present day, which recalls the style of the Coen brothers as much as the cinema of Mario Monicelli for characters and paradoxical character of the story.
Romano with paternal origins Messina, the director, born in 1996, met the audience of Messina at the Lux cinema, for a projection with a moderate debate by the journalist Alessandra Mammoliti. Freely inspired by his own short “The conspiracy barber” – the Cinef first prize at the Cannes 2022 festival – the film features Fabrizio Rongione as Antonio Calabrò, barber of a popular neighborhood in Rome, who torments customers and neighbors with weird theories learned online. Nobody takes him seriously, much less when he is convinced that the street lamps send secret messages with the terminal code. One day the police will present himself to his door to arrest him and his affair will have an unexpected turn.
“The idea was born around 2020, zero year of conspiracy theorists – Ferrara tells us -. I had realized that in Italian cinema there was no film that dealt with this topic, explaining who conspiracy theorists are, what kind of person is those who believe in certain theories, how you fall of the phenomenon, and what it means to be conspiracyers in an era in which everyone gives their response on a reality too complex to be explained with only means of communication. By creating the short we understood that the complexity of the phenomenon required an enlargement of focus ». From here Ferrara and the co-writers Alessandro Logli and Matteo Petecca started working on the classic stereotype of the conspiracy player, to offer a precise and most truthful look possible. “We have shred up the classic cliché because conspiracy is a transversal phenomenon and touches everyone, from the adolescent to the pensioner. We also compared with experts, who suggested to also insert those who use conspiracy theorists for personal purposes, such as Maurizio (Fabrizio Contri), a web phenomenon that finds and fosters true human cases “.
To launch the film, director and production, they have released on social media a series of complocatest theories with satirical background, in which many have believed in many, receiving millions of views. A sort of social experiment, which has revealed the existence of a phenomenon for which the individual is led to conform to what the web spreads, in order to be listened to. «First there were the public places where you found someone to converse with; Today the square is the Facebook bulletin board. In a world dominated by the web and social media, it is therefore likely that in a gloomy moment of life it can be run into theories that feed personal grudge. It can also derive very unpleasant events, such as Pizzagate in the United States ».
Antonella Attili, Antonio Gerardi, Ilir Jacellari, Bruno Pavoncello, Ernesto Mahieux and Roberto De Francesco are also in the cast. It is produced by Elsinore Film and Wildside.
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