Venice, Luca Manfredi: “Tribute to my father compensates for missing career award”

“A tribute to Nino Manfredi, who somehow compensates in retrospect for a great disappointment of my father: never having received a career award in Venice, a failure to recognize such an important artistic life, which I do not hide suffer a lot “. This is what Luca Manfredi – author of the film ‘In arte Nino’ ​​interpreted by Elio Germano and of the book-biography ‘Un friccico ner core’ – present at the Lido of Venice to accompany the pre-opening film of the Venice Film Festival, confesses to AdnKronos: the screening of the restored version of the film ‘By grace received’, which marked the directorial debut of Nino Manfredi, the protagonist of a somewhat autobiographical story. “I am really happy that the Cineteca Nazionale has decided to restore a work that must certainly be protected; and also for the fact that the organizers of the Venice Film Festival have decided to screen it at the opening of the Festival, on the centenary of the birth of my father – recalls Luca Manfredi – In my opinion, it is the most important film by Nino Manfredi, if not in terms of interpretation, certainly from an authorial and personal point of view, given that the screenplay has a strongly autobiographical imprint and tells the story in a different way. his life “. The story of the protagonist, the boy from Ciociaria Benedict who the whole town considers miraculous by Sant’Eusebio after the accidental fall from a high wall, takes us back to the childhood of Nino,” also in some way miraculous as a boy, when closed in a sanatorium because he was sick with tuberculosis, he overcame death three times, with a couple of extreme anointings already given by the priest, leaving at 18 the only survivor of the whole dormitory “. Nino Manfredi, non-believer, “instead of being miraculous, he believed himself to be only luckier than his companions, but he began to ask himself questions about God and divine plans, even with a personal dialogue with the Eternal Father, which led him to make that film that poses the theme of bad religious education imposed in peasant cultures with the bugbear of sin and on superstition that is superimposed on faith “, emphasizes the son. Luca Manfredi will be present at the screening in Venice, despite a fall in the garden of his house in Umbria with severe pain in his wrist: but it will not be the case to hope for a ‘grace received’ for this injury … “Not at all – he replies amused Luca Manfredi – also because I have already played the ‘wild card’ when a lawyer hit me in full with his car, passing through the red light and causing me to have my spleen removed and 13 fractures: I have already taken advantage of the ‘ bonus’, I have already received the grace … “. (by Enzo Bonaiuto)