A talk with the filmmakers vying for the Caligari Prize
A winner in the offing, and an occasion to compare notes on genre cinema in Italy
LA FINE È IGNOTA
Mariolino Migliaccio is just over thirty and has precious little to show for it. A big fan of American movies, he’s a private investigator without a license or even an office, and receives his clients at a bar in the alleys of Genoa. Since his mother, a prostitute, was killed by a client, Mariolino has nothing left but his infallible intuition. He knows every inch of Genoa and what spots to search to bring the city’s secrets to light. No wonder Luigi il Vecchio, the mobster who runs a wellness center that is actually a brothel, has hired Mariolino to go out and find Liveta, one of his “girls” who has run off, where, is anybody’s guess. When our hero realizes that turning up Liveta was just an excuse, and he’s supposed to solve a much bigger and dirtier problem the mob has, it’s way too late to turn back. Bruno Morchio wrote Maccaia in 1999, followed by La creûza degli ulivi, but neither found a publisher. In 2000, the newly founded Fratelli Frilli Editori published his Una storia da carruggi, which sold well and also got his first two books in print. The exploits of private detective Bacci Pagano would continue in eleven more novels. In 2013, Il profumo delle bugie was shortlisted for the Bancarella Award. In 2015, Il testamento del Greco came out, followed by Un piede in due scarpe in 2017. The latter introduced two characters: a psychologist nearing forty, Dr. Paolo Luzi, and a police inspector from the Alto Adige named Ingravallo, a clear homage to the famous don Ciccio in Gadda’s That Awful Mess on Via Merulana. Un piede in due scarpe would receive a Special Mention from the Scerbanenco Award jury.
LA BANDA DEI CARUSI
One morning in April, at the Playa, the only sandy beach in Catania, the body of one Thomas Ruscica is found. Someone has bashed his head in with a rake. Thomas was one of the so-called carusi, the youngsters from the ‘flock’ of don Rosario Limoli, the parish priest who works in a rough part of Catania, San Cristoforo. Vanina Guarrasi knew him: a kid from a problematic family who’d done wrong but was ready to redeem himself and help others like him. Was it the hand of the mob of a crime of passion? That is the question. An ophthalmologist, Cristina Cassar Scalia lives and works in Catania. Her early novels are La seconda estate (2014, translated into French and winner of the International Capalbio Award for a debut novel) and Le stanze dello scirocco (2015). Her novel Sabbia nera (2018, winner of the Leonardo Sciascia-Racalmare Literary Award) introduces the deputy police chief Vanina Guarrasi, a character that won over readers and critics alike and would reappear in her novels La logica della lampara (2019) La salita dei Saponari (2020), L'uomo del porto (2021), Il talento del cappellano (2021), La carrozza della Santa (2022), and Il Re del gelato (2023). With Carlo De Cataldo and Maurizio de Giovanni, she co-wrote Tre passi per un delitto (2020).
L’ANGELO DI CASTELFORTE
Victor Allen, an elderly British lord, sets his sights on an estate in the old village of Castelforte. He wants to found a writers’ residency that will attract authors from around the world to work on a literary project. Castelforte dazzles at the inauguration and promises to be the perfect retreat for its future occupants. Chicca Lopez is recharging her batteries after her last case by sailing the wintery waters off the coast with Glenda, the barista she has fallen for. But their vacation is cut short: a woman writer at the residency is found with a crushed skull. And that’s just the beginning. Gabriella Genisi has written numerous novels and invented the popular character Lolita Lobosco, who features in ten of them, which have now become a TV series directed by Luca Miniero and starring Luisa Ranieri. Another of Genesi’s characters is the carabiniera from Salento, Chicca Lopez, who appeared in 2019, in Pizzica amara, and again in 2021, in La regola di Santa Croce. L'angelo di Castelforte is the third installment in the series.
IL MISFATTO DELLA TONNARA
During a protest march by feminist activists, a teacher is attacked and her body is found in the warehouse at the old tuna fishery. Suspicions soon fall on a young man from an uppercrust family, but the prosecutors are taking their time. Clara Simon, an attractive and stubborn reporter at L’Unione, is not going to sit around doing nothing. She takes to the streets of early 20th-century Cagliari, where the nobility of yore is hanging on and a rising middle class is eager to take over, and discovers just how ferociously the world has always tried to silence women. Francesco Abate made his literary debut with Mister Dabolina (1998), followed by Il cattivo cronista (2003); Ultima di campionato, based on a film treatment and winner of the Solinas Award (2004); Getsemani (2006), and I ragazzi di città (2007). Einaudi brought out his novels Mi fido di te (2007), co-written with Massimo Carlotto; Cosí si dice (2008), Chiedo scusa (co-written with Saverio Mastrofranco, 2010), Un posto anche per me (2013), Mia madre e altre catastrofi (2016), Torpedone trapiantati (2018), I delitti della salina (2020), and Il complotto dei Calafati (2022).
L’INFERNO DEGLI ELETTI
Milan. Police inspector Enea Cristofori has been suspended, and that state of affairs doesn’t help his shaky emotional balance. The psychotherapy sessions he needs to comply with in order to go back to work are not improving his mood. Mortally tired of a patient who won’t collaborate, the psychologist he has seen dozens of times certifies he can return to his job. Now back at headquarters months later, Enea reunites with his friend and partner Gabrio Corso and Sara Sisti, the commissioner he’s secretly in love with. Against the backdrop of a city seeing a spike in domestic violence and attempted murders, the corpse of a woman is found in the Darsena. After obtaining a degree in literature and working as a reporter for fifteen years, covering TV series, entertainment, local news, and briefly fashion and politics, Cristina Brondoni went back to school and got a new degree in applied criminology for investigation and security (Alma Mater Studiorum). Later, she got Master’s in forensic criminology at LIUC. Along with Le case dei serial killer (2022), Brondoni has published three other novels featuring Inspector Enea Cristofori: Voglio vederti soffrire (2019), L'appartamento dell'ultimo piano (2020), and L'inferno degli eletti.
IL TORTO – Readers’ Prize for Best Noir Fiction
He was responsible for seventeen murders. Like the cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, but in just six months – a semester oozing blood. The so-called ‘serial killer of the trains’ was captured twenty-five years ago, and in the spring of the year 2000 was handed thirteen life sentences for the seventeen homicides he claimed he was guilty of. This is his story, split into the seventeen dramatic moments that sealed his fate: seventeen steps to descend to spiral swiftly down to evil. Behind bars, Donato Bilancia got a college degree, though barely literate when he went in. He caught Covid and died just before Christmas 2020, in a cell full of his ghosts and after refusing treatment. Did he turn to religion? Perhaps it crossed his mind. Did he feel remorse? Was he insane, or just overwhelmed with resentment? The case of Donato Bilancia, known as Walter, remains inexplicable today. Carlo Piano was born in Genoa in 1965. In 1998, he covered the Bilancia case as a correspondent for a national newspaper. He is a contributor to La Repubblica, La Stampa, and Il Secolo XIX. Together with his father, architect Renzo Piano, he wrote Atlantide (Feltrinelli), while E/O published, among others, his book Il cantiere di Berto, on the tragedy of the bridge collapse in Genoa and its rebirth.
L’ELETTO
A young, struggling poet at a tiny stand at a small presses’ book fair. He tries and fails to attract the attention of the rare passerby, but no one shows a shred of interest in his latest collection of verse. Out of the blue, two men in suits cross the hall making a beeline for – him. They start to leaf through his book, nodding emphatically, and then hand him a business card. He’s just the kind of guy they’re looking for. He has an interview the next day at a famous company. Our poet has hitched a ride on a lucky star and the sky’s the limit: even the head of the big company takes a liking to him, to the admiration and envy of his co-workers. The poet soon acquires a moniker, one that will prove to be very dangerous: “The chosen one”. The duo consisting of Fulvio Risuleo, one of the most promising film directors and screenwriters of the rising generation, and Antonio Pronostico, internationally renowned cartoonist and illustrator, is back with a new highly original effort, after Sniff and Tango.
IL PIEDE DESTRO DI BYRON
While sailing in the Venice Lagoon with his lady love, Alessandro Nicoli finds an ancient gold coin hard by the deserted island of San Giacomo in Paludo. For Venice native Nicoli, former reporter and accidental detective, it’s the start of an intricate investigation that will draw him into the most secret canals and alleys of the Serenissima, as he tries to unravel the enigma of two murders in Venice with no apparent connection to one another. Alberto Toso Fei, journalist and author of fiction and non-fiction, has written a series of books combining history and mythology, real-life and legend, translated into several languages and selling thousands of copies. His books are like journeys back in time, through the layers of history; they start with Leggende veneziane and Misteri di Venezia – an oral history project, as the author recorded ancient tales told by the elderly that would have otherwise been lost – and extend to Veneziænigma, the graphic novel Orientalia (illustrated by Marco Tagliapietra), and the most recent I graffiti di Venezia (co-written with Desi Marangon), which maps out over six thousand samples of historical graffiti and gives them a voice: a story.
LA TAVERNA DEGLI ASSASSINI
The Year of Our Lord 1793 in the Granduchy of Tuscany. A castle built over an ancient abbey, a corpse wrapped in the vines of a large vineyard. In the pale light of a winter dawn, Baron Calendimarca’s snow-covered vineyards have become the scene of a crime, one that is not only inexplicable but also a dishonor on the nobleman’s family name. Vitale Federici and his devoted right-hand man Bernardo Della Vipera find themselves investigating a crime for which the motives seem to point to the time-old winemaking tradition of the baron’s family and its wine cellar: like a library, the wine cellar very likely harbors a clue to the killer’s identity. Marcello Simoni has published a number of history books and also has a horror story in the anthology 365 racconti horror per un anno, edited by Franco Forte (2011). His first novel, Il mercante di libri maledetti (2011), won the Bancarella Prize. His second, in 2012, was La biblioteca perduta dell'alchimista, while the year 2013 saw a double-header: Il labirinto ai confini del mondo and L'isola dei monaci senza nome. In 2014 his novel L'abbazia dei cento peccati and short story La prigione delle anime were published, this last in the anthology Delitti di Capodanno. In 2016 and 2018, respectively, two titles came out: Il marchio dell'inquisitore and Il monastero delle ombre perdute. Since then Simoni has turned out one title a year: Il lupo nell'abbazia (2019), La selva degli impiccati (2020), Angeli e diavoli (2021), La profezia delle pagine perdute (2021), La cattedrale dei morti (2022), and La taverna degli assassini (2023).
