Life Blood of a land - Salento, the southern part of Apulia - with its ancient roots, with its rituals that cannot be standardized, a spiritual and profane, musical and sensual energy that a young director with a foreign name, Edoardo Winspeare, translates into images (shot in Tricase, Alessano, Lecce and the coast). After Pizzicata, another film marked by the rhythm of tambourine players and actors Pino Zimba and Lamberto Probo of Zoè Group. They are Pino and Donato, 50 and 30 years old, two brothers sharing a common passion for music. The elder is a fiery smuggler and is racked with remorse because he could not save his old father, who died in an accident for which he takes on all the blame. The other one is weaker and begins committing armed crime, also pushed by heroine and bad company. Around them there is an environment where old and modern worlds are combined and in contradiction, reconciling only with the ritual of “pizzica”. And then wives and lovers, sons and mothers, friends and enemies. And contraband of cigarettes, robberies in post offices, women trafficking with the nearby Albania… Up to the ending, which is reminiscent of a Greek tragedy: one of the two brothers sacrifices his life to save the other. An “accurate film which is also an inquiry on the new South of Italy” (Irene Bignardi, director of the Locarno Film Festival).

Edoardo Winspeare

He was born in Klagenfurt in 1965 from an aristocratic and cosmopolitan family, who has been living in Italy since the late 1700 (English father and Middle-European mother, a Liechtenstein). He has always lived in the very small village Depressa, where the Winspeare family have a castle and produce blackbitter wine in Salento, area of which Edoardo has recently become a symbol. He studied Humanities in Florence and graduated from the School of Cinema in Munich. His debut as a director dates back to 1996 with Pizzicata, never distributed in Italy but prize-winning and highly rated in several international festivals. In the same years, he was also one of the founders of the musical group Zoè, with which he revived the “pizzica”. He is also producer, with the Saietta Film Company, of collective films on Salento. Sangue vivo has been the first Italian film invited by Robert Redford to the Sundance Film Festival. His third film, Il miracolo (2003, competing at the Venice Film Festival) is set in Apulia, too, and more precisely in the Taranto of Easter processions and steelworks, where a little boy, after surviving an accident, is thought capable of healing dying and sick people. In 2005 he will shoot a film in Africa on the adventurous life of a cavalry lieutenant during the Second World War.