Sandokàn, Marlondbrando, Saddam…These are nicknames of the minor characters in Mio cognato, set in the marginal and criminal Bari that Piva explores again after his successful debut with Lacapagira (1999). The nicknames refer to legendary achievements, impoverished in a daily life in which the need to survive in a border town between the “clean” lower middle class and widespread illegality is pressing. Twenty-four hours in Bari. The stories of two brothers-in-law, the scoundrel Toni-Rubini and the innocent Vito-Lo Cascio, from the initial mutual coldness to empathy in a possibly delinquent but also creative, musical, linguistically witty South of Italy. The little clerk Vito is victim of a car theft and reports the crime to the police, but the cunning Toni, “the professor” with secondary-school diploma, first reproaches him and then leads him to the underworld in search for his stolen car, on a red cabriolet Saab, through dusty squares, sad ugly barracks-like buildings and an amazing sea front. Vito is eventually nicknamed “Gianni Morandi” due to his resemblance with the popular singer. A tribute to Il sorpasso by Dino Risi with some reference to Ladri di biciclette by De Sica, marked by Iusco’s electronic beats. In two cameos, the director (the lighthouse keeper) and his little son (the baptism child).

Alessandro Piva

The fourty-year-old Piva was born in Salerno, but soon moved to Bari. He is one of the revelation authors of recent years. He took a diploma in film editing at the National School of Cinema in Rome (former CSC), and began his career directing short films and documentaries (also abroad). With a screenplay entitled L’aria è amara written together with Salvatore De Mola from Bari, who was one of the authors of the serial ll commissario Montalbano, Piva wins the Solinas Award. Later, the story becomes the matrix for Mio cognato. With his younger brother Andrea Piva, a highly-regarded short story author, he writes Lacapagira, which costs 150 millions of old lire, paid partly by the director and at first distributed only in Bari, that earns ten times as much. The film, selected for the Berlin Festival’s Forum in 2000, is played in the dialect of Bari (subtitled). It is a story of small criminals starting from a bag of drug coming from the near Albania. Later, Piva directs a trailer distributed on the Internet and paying tribute to Taxi Driver by Martin Scorsese. He then directs Mio cognato, produced by the Italian RAI TV. He is currently working on some footage of the postwar rural Apulia.