Bravo Bene!

Franco Maresco's 2025 Italian documentary is about a film that could not be finished. Maresco was making a film about the theatre performer Carmelo Bene; after an accident on set the producer halted the shooting and the director disappeared. The film makes that collapse its own subject. A writer who is Maresco's friend steps in to reconcile the parties; what the people he speaks with say does not agree, and what emerges is an argument rather than a portrait. Maresco has long made films about unfinished projects and his own failures, and this belongs to that strain. The recording is formally rough and the humour bitter; the documentary does not hesitate to mock itself. Who it's for: those who like Italian experimental cinema and self-referential documentary. Who it's not for: viewers expecting information about Carmelo Bene; the film hardly tells its subject at all.