IFC Films will open GOMORRAH, Matteo Garrone’s film about Italy’s infamous Camorra crime family which is the official Italian Oscar selection for Best Foreign Language Film, in Los Angeles for one week only on Friday, December 19 at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in order to qualify for all categories of the Academy Awards including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as the Broadcast Film Critics Association Critics’ Choice Awards (BFCA), Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA), National Society of Film Critics (NSFC) and other film critics’ awards. GOMORRAH was a critical sensation at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prize. A box-office smash in Italy, the film has received Golden Globe and Spirit Award nominations for Best Foreign Language Film and was honored with 5 European Film Awards, including Best European Film, Director, Actor, Screenwriter and Cinematographer 2008. GOMORRAH will re-open on February 13, 2009 in Los Angeles at Laemmle’s Royal Theatre and in New York at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.
Based on Roberto Saviano’s explosive international bestselling book, GOMORRAH is a sweeping drama with the exacting focus of docu-realism and the deep resonance of tragedy, which explores the Camorra’s vice-like hold on all aspects of life in the Italian regions of Naples and Caserta, as well as its creeping influence on international business and government. The film weaves together five stories of ordinary people forced to reckon with the heavy hand of the Camorra, where every decision, great or small, is a matter of life and death. Two brash teens discover a stash of artillery and pantomime SCARFACE fantasies until they draw the ire of the local boss; an ambitious young man apprentices for a slick mogul dealing in waste management, only to discover that success has its price; a talented tailor, long subjected to mob oversight and graft, secretly takes a night job tutoring Chinese sweatshop workers; a buttoned-up money-runner is suddenly made a pawn in a brutal struggle between warring factions; and a precocious 13-year-old wheedles his way into working for the big boys before finding himself more deeply and irrevocably involved than he’d ever imagined.
Shot in and around a sprawling, decrepit apartment complex, Garrone’s (THE EMBALMER) breakthrough film sheds light on a shadow organization that rules by fear and unsparing violence, tacitly fostered from above and abroad by greed, corruption and complicity.
