Annual Top Films Lists

Top 100 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2022: #49. Abel Ferrara’s Padre Pio

Published on January 11, 2022

Padre Pio

His insatiable appetite for the seventh art means that when Abel Ferrara ain’t making one movie in particular, he is already onto some other project. His output in the last five years includes one doc, Tommaso (2019), Siberia (2019) and Locarno winning Zeros and Ones (2021). Long in the works and the subject of his 2015 docu Searching for Padre Pio, the fiction film Padre Pio would inevitably have a part for Willem Dafoe but he also made the interesting casting choice of Shia LaBeouf – rescuing him from his persona non grata status. Production would have begun last November and so this will likely target a Venice Film Festival showing – a festival that the Italian American is a recurrent guest at.

Gist: Set in Italy in post World War I, this centers on the younger years of Italian Saint Padre Pio – a monk from Puglia.

Release Date/Prediction: Venice Film Festival should be in the cards – but will there be room for this to be in comp? San Sebastian Film Festival should provide a second premiere.

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).