A CHIARA
a film by
Jonas Carpignano
Winner of the Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight Award and a rising voice of Italian cinema, filmmaker Jonas Carpignano continues his exploration of the intricacies of life in contemporary Calabria with this compelling character study of a teenager, Chiara, who gradually comes to discover that her close-knit family is not all that it seems. In this furiously paced drama, Chiara investigates her father’s disappearance just one day after her oldest sister’s birthday. As she gets closer to the difficult truth about her mysteriously missing father—and the crime syndicates that control her region— Chiara is forced to decide what kind of future she wants for herself. A coming-of-age chronicle like no other, A CHIARA is both an intimate and universal family story.
Director’s Fortnight, Cannes 2021
New York Film Festival 2021
Nominated for 3 Independent Spirit Awards
“Instantly engaging. A Chiara lifts the director’s scrappy neo-neorealism to another level, showing him increasingly in command of the medium and physically entrenched in the milieu he continues to explore in fascinating detail. His most accomplished, polished and affecting film to date though it still maintains enough grittiness and rough edges to fit the material. Again coaxing impeccably unselfconscious performances out of nonprofessional actors… There’s a new urgency to the drama once it kicks in, a more haunting intimacy that comes in no small part from the churning depths of Rotolo’s central performance. A shattering climax.”
–David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
Opens May 27 in Theaters