THURSDAY 20 NOV – H 21:00 – ROOM 5

HUNGRY HEARTS
ITALY – 2014 – color – 109’

Synopsis
Jude is American, while Mina is Italian. They meet by chance in New York, where they fall in love, get married, and soon after discover they are expecting a baby.
They quickly find themselves living a completely new life. From the beginning of her pregnancy, Mina is convinced that her child will be special — a certainty which stems from her infallible maternal instinct. Her son must be protected from the contamination of the outside world. In order to respect his nature, his purity must be preserved. Jude, out of love for Mina, goes along with her approach, until one day he is faced with a terrible truth: his young son’s development is in decline and his life is in danger and he must act quickly to save him. An internal battle begins within the couple, leading to a desperate search for a solution in which each one’s reasoning becomes blurred.

critical note
“(…) Reflecting on submission, madness, and the terror of infection, Costanzo overturns these viewpoints through cinema itself; Hungry Hearts is defiantly “infected” cinema, rendering the blending of intuitions, fluids, and diseases its aesthetic weapon. Only with the fusion of such heterogeneous elements can meaning still be found within the narration, story, and plot, where thriller elements and vague hints of horror slowly permeate this chamber drama. Except for a few sequences, the film is mostly shot indoors, —a choice that becomes not only interesting, but even necessary. (…)”
(Raffaele Meale, Quinlan.it, 1 September 2014)

main awards and festivals