Gomorrah

GOMORRAH is Matteo Garrone’s epic, mesmerizing tour-de-force about Italy’s infamous Camorra crime family which is the official Italian Oscar® selection for Best Foreign Language Film. GOMORRAH was a critical sensation at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prize. A box-office smash in Italy, the film screened at the Toronto and New York film festivals, recently unspooled at the AFI-FEST and received 5 European Film Award nominations, including European Film and European Director, Actor and Screenwriter 2008.

Based on Roberto Saviano's explosive international best-selling book, GOMORRAH is a sweeping drama with the exacting focus of docu-realism and the deep resonance of tragedy, which explores the Camorra’s vice-like hold on all aspects of life in the Italian regions of Naples and Caserta, as well as its creeping influence on international business and government. The film weaves together five stories of ordinary people forced to reckon with the heavy hand of the Camorra, where every decision, great or small, is a matter of life and death. Two brash teens discover a stash of artillery and pantomime SCARFACE fantasies until they draw the ire of the local boss; an ambitious young man apprentices for a slick mogul dealing in waste management, only to discover that success has its price; a talented tailor, long subjected to mob oversight and graft, secretly takes a night job tutoring Chinese sweatshop workers; a buttoned-up money-runner is suddenly made a pawn in a brutal struggle between warring factions; and a precocious 13-year-old wheedles his way into working for the big boys before finding himself more deeply and irrevocably involved than he’d ever imagined.

Masterfully shot in and around a sprawling, decrepit apartment complex, Garrone’s (THE EMBALMER) breakthrough film sheds light on a shadow organization that rules by fear and unsparing violence, tacitly fostered from above and abroad by greed, corruption and complicity. With powerful naturalistic performances by a largely non-professional cast, GOMORRAH pointedly eschews the romanticism and hero worship of its mob film forebears, and is a brave, unflinching look at the true face of organized crime.

“The best movie I’ve seen at this year’s (Cannes) festival, as well as a furious and brilliant engagement with the times in which we live.” – A.O. Scott, The New York Times

A 2008 Golden Globe nominee for Best Foreign Film.

“Part of what’s bracing about “Gomorrah,” and makes it feel different from so many American crime movies, is both its deadly serious take on violence and its global understanding of how far and wide the mob’s tentacles reach, from high fashion to the very dirt.” (Manohla Dargis, New York Times)