Luce

A character study pitched at the boundary between reality and dreams, Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino’s (Crater, Open Roads 2018) new feature, which premiered at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival, is an absorbing work that explores the subjectivity of a lonely woman stifled by her environment. Marianna Fontana stars as an anonymous leatherworker in mountainous southern Italy who leads a solitary life amid harsh industrial conditions. She enlists the help of a photographer to fly a drone over a prison wall in the hopes of connecting with her incarcerated father, and this becomes the inciting incident for a mesmerizing headlong journey into a realm beyond the true and the false, the real and the imagined. Fontana is entrancing as our on-screen surrogate, and Luzi and Bellino’s camera relentlessly traces the contours of her face to capture the transformation of desire into obsession.