Tortorici's 'Ketticè' Premieres at Locarno With Bellucci
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- Giovanni Tortorici premieres "Ketticè" in competition at the Locarno Film Festival, his second feature after "Diciannove" launched from Venice Horizons last year.
- "Ketticè" is a coming-of-age drama set in 2012 Palermo about working-class Ketty and upper-middle-class Giulio, whose friendship centers on buying pot from a street dealer as "a shared refuge... away from the judging eye of the adult world," per the synopsis.
- Tortorici street-cast nearly all roles, with non-professionals Rachele Testagrossa and Salvatore Gallina as the leads; Monica Bellucci is among the few professional actors, cast as Giulio's mother because a non-pro couldn't play the part.
- Bellucci plays an aristocratic Sicilian matron who is "very elegant" in public but "pretty eccentric and even slightly violent" in private — a class dynamic Tortorici calls "transnational... rather than a territorial thing just in Palermo."
- Luca Guadagnino, Tortorici's partner, produced both features and offers what Tortorici calls "maieutic" advice — Socratic questioning to draw out the director's intentions rather than dictate them.
- Tortorici describes 2012 Palermo as "marked by political stagnation, cultural numbness and the first pervasive impact of social media," a setting the teens navigate while worrying about police surveillance cameras when smoking.
Why it matters: At 30, Tortorici has placed features at Venice and Locarno in consecutive years with Guadagnino producing — a rapid trajectory for a director relying on street casting. Bellucci taking a narrow, tonally specific supporting role in a non-professional-heavy indie underscores her willingness to subvert her usual star-vehicle casting.
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