La guerra degli Antò

Four young men in a provincial town on the Adriatic coast in nineties Italy. All four are called Antonio, everybody calls them Antò, and all four are looking for somewhere else to be. Punk, football, military service, no work, and war footage running on the television: all of it belongs to the same stuck feeling. The town will not hold them and the outside will not take them. Riccardo Milani's first film is adapted from Silvia Ballestra's Antò stories. It holds adolescent energy and provincial melancholy in the same frame, starting as comedy and ending somewhere quite different. It is one of the few Italian films of the decade that looked squarely at its own young. The town is almost a fifth character.