SICCITÀ / DRY

In Rome it hasn’t rained for three years and the lack of water is overturning rules and habits. Through the city dying of thirst and prohibitions moves a chorus of people, young and old, marginalised and successful, victims and profiteers. Their lives are linked in a single design, while each seeks his or her deliverance.

PAOLO VIRZÌ

He started to work as a screenwriter at a very early age and then made his directorial debut with La Bella Vita (1994), premiered at Venice, straightway displaying an unmistakable style, a mix of melancholy, irony and social drama. It can be said that Virzì has created, with his seventeen films peopled by starry-eyed antiheroes and vulnerable outsiders eager for redemption - at time characterized by the breezy energy of the comedy, at others with the darker tints of the film noir - a kaleidoscopic, affectionate and at the same time biting mosaic of Italian society over the last thirty years. In some of his works, such as Hardboiled Egg (1997) Grand Jury Special Prize at the 54th Venice Film Festival and The First Beautiful Thing (2010), his stories are immersed in the atmosphere of the working class area of Livorno where he was born. But he has also ventured onto the road, exploring the East Coast of the USA in The Leisure Seeker (2017) a film shown in competition at the 74th Venice Film Festival and starring Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren, who was nominated at the Golden Globes for the Best Performance by an Actress for this film. His movie, Magical Nights (2018) is a loving and irreverent evocation of the mythology of great Italian cinema, as Virzì encountered it when he first arrived in Rome as a young man.

Reveiws:

Dry could hardly be more timely, or sound a more urgent warning note. It’s an honourable, clever, inventive and handsomely staged film.

Jonathan Romney, Screendaily

 

Paolo Virzì’s film is a dystopia suggested to him by the recent Covid-19 pandemic, using sarcasm to depict a hopelessly killing society.

Camillo De Marco, Cineuropa