Top 100 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2021: #66. Paolo Taviani’s Leonora Addio

Leonora Addio

Following the death of his brother and fellow co-director Vittorio Taviani in 2018, Paolo Taviani continues with his first solo effort Leonora Addio, based on the novella Il Chiodo by Nobel prize winner Luigi Pirandello. Produced through Rai Cinema and Donatella Palermo’s Stemal Entertainment, the project is headlined by Fabrizio Ferracane (of Bellocchio’s The Traitor, 2019) and Massimo Popolizio. Nicola Piovani (who won an Oscar for scoring Life is Beautiful, 1998) provides the score, while regular Taviani DP Simone Zampagni will lens alongside Paolo Carnera (Bad Tales, 2020). The Taviani Bros. emerged as one of Italy’s most prominent filmmaking duos in the 1970s, winning the Palme d’Or in 1977 for Padre Padrone and Cannes would be great to them with their 1982 classic The Night of Shooting Stars  with the brothers winning the Grand Prize of the Jury and the Ecumenical Jury Prize. They returned to the competition in 1993 with Fiorile. The Venice Film Festival provided them with their first major platform in 1962, where Un uomo da bruciare (co-directed with Valentino Orsini) won several awards and they competed for the Golden Lion in 1967 with I sovversivi. Berlin provided the Taviani Bros. with their latter year platform, winning the Golden Bear in 2012 for Caesar Must Die.

Gist: Taviani weaves together a tale of three surreal Pirandello funerals intertwined with the murder of a young Sicilian immigrant boy in Brooklyn for what is described as a surreal, grotesque, complex narrative.

Release Date/Prediction: Taviani filmed the project through September and October of 2020, confirming post production should be completed by the end of the year. His last project, 2017’s Rainbow: A Private Affair premiered at TIFF, but Leonora Addio could be his second time competing for the Golden Bear in Berlin 2021.