Mary Forever

Marco Terzi, a teacher transferred from Milan to Palermo, takes a post in a juvenile prison while he waits for a secondary school place to open. The boys in his class are inside for theft, drugs, assault. Among them is a young trans woman called Mery, and the film takes its name from her. Marco Risi directs. Michele Placido plays Terzi, with Claudio Amendola, Francesco Benigno and Alessandra Di Sanzo. It comes from a novel by Aurelio Grimaldi, and one detail matters: Grimaldi did not invent this. He taught in the Malaspina juvenile prison in Palermo. The film's Rosaspina is that institution barely disguised. The character of Mery drew on a real person, Mery Libassi, arrested for wounding a client. The film won the Efebo d'oro for direction in 1989 and the Ciak d'oro for best film in 1990. Risi followed it the next year with Ragazzi fuori, which picks up the same boys outside. Taken together the two are usually treated as the start of Italian cinema's return to social realism at the end of the eighties. Who it is for: viewers who want Italian social realism and Palermo as it stood at that moment. Who it is not for: the film softens nothing and saves nobody. Anyone expecting an uplifting teacher story is in the wrong place.