40 Seconds

On the night of 5 September 2020 in Colleferro, near Rome, twenty-one-year-old Willy Monteiro Duarte stepped in to help a friend caught in a fight. The time until his death was forty seconds. The film builds the twenty-four hours leading to that night by following separately the days of the young people involved: chance encounters, old grievances, and the tension gathering underneath. Vincenzo Alfieri's film takes off from Federica Angeli's book of the same name. The narrative treats the event not as a murder investigation but through how violence became ordinary. Showing what the perpetrators too were doing the day before is its most contested and most deliberate choice; the aim is not to understand but to remove the distance. It screened at the Rome Film Festival in 2025 and opened in Italy on 19 November 2025. Who it's for: Viewers of Italian drama drawn from real events and films about social violence. Who it's not for: The scene of the killing is unavoidable and very hard to watch. The dramatisation of a real murder is also not for every viewer.