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English Titles L

Little Red Boy

Original title: Rosso Malpelo
Italy, 2007

Director: Scimeca, Pasquale
Production company: Arbash Società Cooperativa

Synopsis:
In an indefinite time and place in history, lived - and lives - a boy with red hair and red freckly face. Everyone calls him Little Boy Red. He is so poor that working in a mine is the only way of earning his bread. One unlucky day his father dies in the mine crushed by a landslide and Little Boy Red is alone. His mother remarries and leaves to live elsewhere. Then his sister leaves with her boyfriend, too. At this point the family home is barred. Back at the mine, among the many child-workers, there is one in particular to whom Boy Red relates to better, Ranocchio (Froggy). Unfortunately, Ranocchio is not used to working in such harsh conditions and therefore falls ill. Boy Red, who has a soft centre, carries him home to his mother. Now he is completely alone and when the owner of the mine decides to send him off to work in a distant and dangerous place, he agrees immediately. He is convinced that if something should happen to him no one would notice or care for he is Little Boy Red. (Source: Giffoni FF 2007)

Comments:
From the novel by Giovanni Verga, with the same title.

Director's statement
“Tragedy has no time and no precise history. The mine caves into the belly of the earth where time and history are annulled.  Child exploitation and loneliness are of every time and every historical period”.
"Form is substance. Rupture with what is banal and what is slavish to power is substance that assumes form via the bodies and the faces of the non-actors, language is form of  substance and is the incomprehensible archaic-post-modern dialects through which the kids in the favelas express their feelings. The form of the mine is substance; a long piece of intestine that runs down into the belly of the mother (earth) wide a  metre and 150 cm tall”.
“Cinema in its primitive state frees itself of all that is superfluous, of every aesthetics and rhetoric, alibis are annulled, the camera is no longer a hiding place for the director and actions itself”. (Source: Giffoni FF 2007)

Festivals:
Giffoni 2007, Castellinaria Bellinzona 2007

Website: www.rossomalpelofilm.it

World sales address/es:
Adriana Chiesa Enterpridr srl

Sold to:
Morandini (CH)