An in-depth research, in the wake of passionate curiosity that characterizes all his cinematographic work, to get to the essence of Padre Pio’s holiness, and to be able to tell it free of judgments, in a concrete and real way. This is the effort that Abel Ferrara tells journalists in presenting his ‘Padre Pio’ at the 79th Venice Film Festival in competition at the Giornate degli Autori. “It was a very thorough job – explained the American director – where we retraced not only all the territories where Padre Pio had been but above all the places of the massacre of San Giovanni Rotondo”. The film, starring Shia LaBoeuf, tells the mystical figure of the great saint of Pietrelcina revisiting the tragic episode of the massacre of San Giovanni Rotondo which took place on October 14, 1920, when 14 people were killed and 60 injured in Piazza Municipio. It was the first peasant socialist victory repressed in blood, which coincided with the arrival in the city of the young friar. “Why a film about Padre Pio? – Ferrara explains answering the reporters’ questions – Because I knew him as a saint, from the first time I heard about him, and I asked myself: what makes a person a saint? I was working in Naples, and in Naples, wherever you may be, you see images and icons of either Maradona or Padre Pio, and I became passionate and intrigued. “What emerged, reveals the director, prompted him to create a film about him. “I discovered that he was a man of compassion, of pity, of service – says Ferrara – A man who has never moved from Puglia, where there are very high temperatures, yet he was always wearing these heavy clothes to listen to the complaints from people, and he always had an answer, and this made him famous all over the world although he never moved from there. “A fascinating and mysterious figure who got there” with nothing riding a donkey, he managed to build a 35 million dollar hospital in a place where there was nothing. ” The filmmaker, as on other occasions, compares the figure of the friar of Pietrelcina to two iconic figures of literature. “For me he is like Pasolini and Baudelaire, a great writer, who writes incredible things. He allowed us to get to his heart, that’s why a film about him”. On the protagonist Shia LaBoeuf, a troubled artist who has repeatedly emphasized how this film took him out of the abyss of a suicidal will, giving him hope and giving him a spiritual perspective, he adds a few words: “I didn’t know Shia LaBoeuf we met on Zoom, we talked and the way it happened is already a miracle in itself “Shot in one month mainly in Monte Sant’Angelo, Puglia, from 24 November to 17 December 2021, the film – which also stars Asia Argento, Luca Lionello, Brando Pacitto and Mrco Leonardi – is presented by pulia Film Commission and the Puglia Region, and is produced by Maze Pictures (German), Interlinea Film (Italian) and Rimsky Productions (English). The screening is scheduled for tonight at 4.45 pm at the Lido in Sala Perla. (from the correspondent Ilaria Floris)