Lo zio di Brooklyn (The uncle from Brooklyn)

In an apocalyptic Palermo, the Gemelli family is forced to shelter and hide an uncle from Brooklyn. The request comes from the Dwarves mafia clan – and refusing them is simply not an option. The mysterious guest neither speaks, nor sleeps, nor eats, while a cast of strange, unsettling figures circles around him. As in the sketches of Cinico TV, Palermo becomes a desolate landscape inhabited by a brutalised, ghostly humanity. The cultural genocide foretold by Pier Paolo Pasolini has come to pass.

This film tells the story of the end of humanity. Not the end of the bourgeoisie, as the historical avant-gardes once imagined, but humanity itself: undone by ignorance, indolence, inner poverty, by having nothing left to offer. [...] Decaying, foul-smelling bodies; nearlunar landscapes; degraded places crushed beneath the sky; echoes of Ford and Pasolini, silent comedy, Italian Neorealism and the gangster film. Uncle from Brooklyn is also about the end of cinema. [...] Carmelo Bene called Ciprì and Maresco “gli scoreggioni” (“the farters”), but he saw in them both genius and the comic dimension of the tragic: everything carried to an unacceptable extreme, beyond good taste. In their work, he recognised the grandeur of the sacred. Ciprì and Maresco understood that they had to embrace the comic and the macabre, not realism, which they avoided like the plague. Even the simplest images – a sunset over the city’s ruins or the countryside – become metaphysical. You sense the sacred; you feel unease, the weight of an unanswered question. [...] Such unease was rare in Italian cinema. Rossellini perhaps came closest. Journey to Italy and Europe ‘51 puzzled Italian audiences because Italian Catholicism – with rare exceptions – has never been metaphysical but resolutely earthly. That is the source of Ciprì and Maresco’s greatness.
Goffredo Fofi

PRODUCTION 1:
Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna,
via Riva di Reno 72
40122 Bologna, Italy
Tel: +39 0512194214
E-mail: cinetecadirezione@cineteca.bologna.it
Web: http://www.cinetecadibologna.it

PRODUCTION 2:
Filmauro Srl - Luigi De Laurentiis, Aurelio De Laurentiis,
Piazza Venezia 5
00187 Roma, Italy

PRODUCTION AT THE TIME OF FILMING: 
​Digital Film

LAB:
L‘Immagine Ritrovata

WORLD SALES:
Filmauro Srl - De Laurentiis Luigi e Aurelio
Piazza Venezia 5
00187 Roma, Italy

ITALIAN DISTRIBUTION:
Filmauro Srl - De Laurentiis Luigi e Aurelio
Piazza Venezia 5
00187 Roma, Italy

PRESS OFFICE:
Andrea Ravagnan - Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna
Tel: +39 0512194833 / +39 3358300839
E-mail: andrea.ravagnan@cineteca.bologna.it