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

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.