“CIAO BAMBINO” BY EDGARDO PISTONE
Our spotlight on the visions of others. Our Spotlight is curated by Gianmaria Tammaro.
For a director, making a debut means letting go. It also means learning to place complete trust in someone else. A first film is like a silent pact: I put all of myself into it, but you—actor, producer, screenwriter—must commit and believe in me. It’s not a game, it’s not a joke: it’s an idea that finally finds a way to express itself. Debuting is complicated, because it requires resources and courage. Faced with a work like Ciao Bambino, the first film directed and co-written by Edgardo Pistone, it’s hard not to be pleasantly surprised. Despite the essential means, the result is a complex and rich story, deeply rooted in reality yet never—this is crucial—rhetorical.
Pistone chose two first-time actors as protagonists, Marco Adamo and Anastasia Kaletchuk, and set the film in the Traiano district of Naples. The black-and-white cinematography by Rosario Cammarota adds an additional layer of texture and credibility. Two young people who meet by chance—he is Neapolitan, she is a foreigner; he is forced to carry out the orders of a local criminal to repay his father’s debts, while she is forced into prostitution—become the symbol of something greater. Not fate or luck, but life itself. What Pistone does, alongside co-writer Ivan Ferone, is to merge the instinctive visceral quality of poetry with the blunt brutality of lived experience (his father Luciano also appears among the cast).
In the simplified language of film criticism, we could say that Ciao Bambino is a story of growth and awareness. But if we look closely, it is also a story of emancipation and rupture, of children who must survive their parents, and of promises that anticipate other promises. Ciao Bambino is beautiful. Beautiful in the way first films should be: bold, powerful, and fully in control of their means. Credit is also due to the producers—Bronx Film, Anemone Film, Mosaicon Film, and Minerva Pictures—who chose to listen to Pistone and to follow him in his debut.
