BALON

Sierra Leone, today. Amin is ten years old and loves playing football. With his sister Isokè, who is 15, they find themselves alone after the slaughter of their family by some mercenaries during a shooting in their small village. Plucking up each other’s courage, they start a journey to escape to death and misery with few things in a backpack. They only know that they have to head North, without having the slightest idea of where Sweden is, the country suggested by their grandfather. They go through many landscapes, rivers, they spend the night in the desert, meet two good people who help them and some criminal human traffickers who only consider them as a source of profit.

the director

His first 16mm feature film, La donzelletta (1989) tells about the loneliness of a drug-addicted girl.
In 1997 he directed I briganti di Zabut (1997) but it’s in 2000, with Placido Rizzotto (2000) that he definitely conquered the Italian critics. The story of the disappearance of the socialist secretary of the Corleone trade union in 1948 is an opportunity to talk about the fine line between men and mafia. In 2003, on the transformed set of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, he directed Gli indesiderabili, adapted from the book of the same name by Giancarlo Fusco, witness of the disembarkation in Genoa of 120 people expelled from the United States; in 2005, La passione di Giosuè l'ebreo won the Unesco Award. He got back to Italian Verismo with the film adaptation of the short story Rosso Malpelo (2007) by Giovanni Verga (presented at Castellinaria). After the documentary Il cavaliere Sole (2008), he worked again on Verga with the drama Malavoglia (2010) and Biagio (2014).