01 Aug CON LA GRAZIA DI UN DIO by Alessandro Roia
Venetian Nights 2023
CON LA GRAZIA DI UN DIO
WITH THE GRACE OF A GOD
by Alessandro Roia
Italy, 2023, 74′, colour
Screenplay: Alessandro Roia, Ivano Fachin
Programming calendar: TBC
Back in Genoa for the first time in twenty-five years, to attend the funeral of his best friend from when he was growing up, Luca reunites with the old gang of yore. All of them are sure that the late lamented had brought it on himself, with his dissipated lifestyle. Not Luca: he wants to know, investigate, understand. He searches his memory, in a city as changed as he is, as characters and situations reemerge ghost-like from a buried past, along with Luca’s own true nature, which he thought he had definitively tamed.
«Talking about my own film, the first I’ve directed, is something new to me. With the Grace of a God is the story of a man who “like Achilles, carries war”, incapable of expressing his own feelings and forced to confront the darkness he holds inside, as we all do. Yet it is also a film about time, a ghost story about men and women hounded by a past that combines romanticism and sorrow». [Alessandro Roia]
Alessandro Roia completed his film studies at the CSC – Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in 2004. In 2008, he co-starred in the TV series Romanzo criminale – la serie, in the role of Dandi. The next year he bowed on the big screen in Feisbum – Il film, inspired by the social network Facebook. In 2011 he played Bruno in the film L’erede – The Heir by Michael Zampino. One year later, he doubled up with two film roles, the first in Ferzan Özpetek’s Magnifica presenza, the second a starring role in Carlo Virzì’s I più grandi di tutti. Roia’s next film turn was in Diaz – Don’t Clean Up This Blood by Daniele Vicari. On the small screen, he appeared in the Rai TV series L’olimpiade nascosta by Alfredo Peyretti and played the Torino soccer player Luigi Meroni in La farfalla granata. Roia co-starred in the Manetti Bros.’ Song’e Napule, alongside Giampaolo Morelli, and was nominated for Best Actor at both the Silver Ribbons and the Globo d’oro. With the Grace of a God marks Roia’s directorial debut.