Q&A with Enrico Maria Artale on June 1

A film about a mother-son relationship with a neo-noir twist, Enrico Maria Artale’s fourth feature stars Edoardo Pesce as Julio Cesar, a fortysomething crook who lives with his Colombian mother (Margarita Rosa de Francisco). Living on the margins, the two share everything—including income from a local drug dealer. But their familial harmony is disturbed by the arrival of a young Colombian drug mule, leading to a contentious new state of affairs for the pair. A vividly traced tragedy powered by the remarkable performances of its dual leads, El Paraíso is a transfixing drama that stress-tests the ties that bind to meditate upon the status of love in a world ruled by violence.