Michele is a proud and lonely 55-year-old man who works as a night watchman in a local factory. The loss of his job overturn his everyday life: the man reacts to the changes by clinging to his own certainties, but events inevitably force him to question his world. The frustration and anger that Michele tries to repress are destined to explode in the obsessive search for personal revenge.
"Taking the reporting of the Italian province as its starting point, I Fuochi deals with the extreme crisis of an ordinary man. The loss of certainties and the crisis of social roles, the redemption from personal anxieties through the search for scapegoats, and the impulse towards hatred is typical of the era we live in and have given rise to suburban areas in which each individual proudly perseveres in fighting a continuous personal war. Full of contradictions, irrational drives and anger towards targets and enemies chosen more by proximity than by arbitrariness. These explicit conflicts, have social (and political) implications closely linked to our country's present and historical moment. I Fuochi is the immersion in a world that has lost its identity at once post-rural and post-industrial. The province of northern Italy - is portrayed as a universal image that explores dynamics common to other countries. I Fuochi is an atypical contemporary western, combining the stylistic features of the new American rural cinema with those of arthouse films of a typically European tradition. Michele expresses the exasperation of an often emotionally uneducated generation that has proudly focused its life on a job that it believed would be forever. But, unfortunately, the change catches him unprepared, forcing him to question himself and his role within the community: a lonely, post-ideological and individualistic character, incapable of making a move, which if not rational, is at least human. Michele's story concerns us much more closely than the character's deliberately extreme condition, and this is the urgency that drives me to want to tell it. Never as much as in these times of such rapid and violent change is necessary to reflect on what we are, what we were, and what we could be."
"Taking the reporting of the Italian province as its starting point, I Fuochi deals with the extreme crisis of an ordinary man. The loss of certainties and the crisis of social roles, the redemption from personal anxieties through the search for scapegoats, and the impulse towards hatred is typical of the era we live in and have given rise to suburban areas in which each individual proudly perseveres in fighting a continuous personal war. Full of contradictions, irrational drives and anger towards targets and enemies chosen more by proximity than by arbitrariness. These explicit conflicts, have social (and political) implications closely linked to our country's present and historical moment. I Fuochi is the immersion in a world that has lost its identity at once post-rural and post-industrial. The province of northern Italy - is portrayed as a universal image that explores dynamics common to other countries. I Fuochi is an atypical contemporary western, combining the stylistic features of the new American rural cinema with those of arthouse films of a typically European tradition. Michele expresses the exasperation of an often emotionally uneducated generation that has proudly focused its life on a job that it believed would be forever. But, unfortunately, the change catches him unprepared, forcing him to question himself and his role within the community: a lonely, post-ideological and individualistic character, incapable of making a move, which if not rational, is at least human. Michele's story concerns us much more closely than the character's deliberately extreme condition, and this is the urgency that drives me to want to tell it. Never as much as in these times of such rapid and violent change is necessary to reflect on what we are, what we were, and what we could be."
Production
Ginko Film
In associacion with
Film Commision Torino Piemonte - Film Tv Development Fund
Producers
Chiara Andrich
Screenplay
Fabio Bobbio / Zelia Zbogar