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Salty Air

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From the liner notes

Writer-director Alessandro Angelini’s impressive debut feature tells the emotional story of a man meeting his father for the first time — at the prison where he works and his father serves time.

Review

It is remarkable to find a film that not only avoids the clichés common in dealing with the difficulties of father-and-son relationships, but which also finds new ways to express these complications. Angelini has done exactly that in Salty Air, the story of Sparti and Fabio, a father and son who have been made strangers by the elder’s twenty years of incarceration for murder. When Sparti is transferred to the prison where Fabio has been doing social work, it is only after several minutes of a preliminary interview that Fabio realizes his father’s identity and is forced to leave the room to regain his composure. The son’s decision to reach out to his father, who himself doesn’t recognize Fabio, tears his family apart. Sparti is a hardbitten, tough old man who has been consigned by his wife and children to a sort of non-existence, separated not only by distance and time, but also by the willful forgetfulness that their families have created to hide their humiliation. Lead actors Giorgio Pasotti and Giorgio Colangeli square off in an emotionally powerful and cruel series of scenes which reveal the underlying reasons why this father-and-son relationship may never be saved. (Italian with English subtitles)

-- Robert Cargni