Top 20 Alternative Picks for Cannes ​2013: ​Fabio ​​Grassadonia & Antonio Piazza’s Salvo

Salvo – Fabio ​​Grassadonia & Antonio Piazza

Section: Critics’ Week

Buzz: ​A first feature film from Sicilian directors, Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza, selected for Critics’ Week, it is a crime noir with a touch of the surreal. Shot by director & cinematographer Daniele Cipri, the images are haunting and promising. The producer Fabrizio Mosca defined the film as​ “an extreme, stylized, researched and rigorous film, in the style of Le Samourai by J.P. Melville.”​ A statement that produces anticipatory excitement. One hopes it is precisely as promised.

The Gist: Salvo is a mafia killer in Palermo. Rita is twenty and blind from birth. Salvo sneaks into Rita’s house, to kill her brother. There is a fight, a ferocious, hand to hand struggle. Rita’s blind eyes, trembling with rage and distress, staring at him yet unseeing, seem to disturb Salvo and he closes them with his hands covered in blood. When he removes the hands, Rita’s eyes see for the first time.