Punta Sacra

Film Review: Haunting and strange, Francesca Mazzoleni’s Puntasacra is a compelling slice of life in matriarchal Idroscalo, “the last self-built neighbourhood in Rome”. Foul-mouthed tech- and pyrotechnics-obsessed children play around bizarre homemade sculptures, intended to represent jolly circus animals but transformed into something sinister by the endless wintry skies and constant barrage of sea-spray. Christmas arrives; a repainted ladder does duty as a tree, and an Italian-language karaoke version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah serves in place of Christmas songs. There is no Father Christmas, but a huge, tawdry Minnie Mouse and Peppa Pig. The film is at its best when its subjects volubly argue the merits of Pier Paolo Pasolini (who was brutally murdered nearby in 1975), communism, fascism, and private hairdressing school. The priest of a tiny church in a perennially flooded, unpaved street reminds us that “being keepers of a place is different from owning it.” Apt words indeed, in a town where every structure is “unauthorised”, and property developers circle like vultures. In the end, Mazzoleni’s exploration of a town whose destruction is only ever one big wave away emerges as a statement on the tenuousness, and the absurdity, of life itself. Dan MacCannell