The years of the father
Sinossi by
Stefano Veneruso
Corrado, a Jewish,
orthodox young Israeli man in his twenties suddenly discovers that his long
lost father is not dead but has created a new family for himself in Italy.
Corrado’s decision is final: in order to know and recuperate his father, he is
prepared and willing to even give up the protective figure of his mother Rosa.
His father, Sebastiano,
is more than ever on the run from his past. His typically bourgeois life,
comforted by his family, for him indispensable, seems to protect him,
unconsciously, from any sense of guilt, therefore from himself. At what price
or condition is Sebastiano willing to recognize and accept, after so many
years, his deliberately "forgotten" son?
The frequent and
clandestine meetings with his father turn out, for Corrado, a real torture;
endured as a kind of thin, piercing interplay of acceptance and rejection,
defiance and indifference, hope and denial. But, little by little, Corrado
rebels against all this: he lucidly decides to take revenge of the arrogance
and constant moral paternal blackmail, moreover, very much aware, of having to
even give up the love in which he wanted to believe in and for which he was
willing to fight without truce nor hypocrisy.
This is, therefore, the
story of a young "ordinary" man, meek and desperately thirsty for
love. A tense inner journey, madly driven to the brink of a huge void. That is,
the extreme edge: a metaphor of a father blinded by his bondless pride and
unfathomable fears, of not by an innate, savage cynicism.
