And I’ll tell you why I’m excited, plus reveal a bit of the story and where it will take place.
Secrecy is the shroud that surrounds Paolo Sorrentino’s latest. This is usually the case for his films and the reason why, when they first screen at festivals, everyone is elbowing all the others out of the way into the cinema.
At this year’s La Biennale Cinema, the Venice International Film Festival, Sorrentino’s La Grazia will kick off the festivities and I tell you, I am hoping I can get a gala ticket to the official screening. Fingers crossed, as a Golden Globes voter, and a lover of all things Sorrentino.
The film, by La Grande Bellezza’s Oscar winning director, stars Toni Servillo and Anna Ferzetti, both Italian stars. Servillo is also a frequent collaborator of Sorrentino, having appeared in almost all of his film, I think seven in total, including his Academy Award winning title. And La Grazia is officially labelled as a “drama,” not much to go on but that’s all folks. Sorrentino does have a cool Instagram account so maybe more info will be posted there… Follow it to find out. And he says films to him aren’t like children, they’re like new girlfriends and as soon as he’s finished with one, he’s already moved on to the next. He’s an iconoclast, that’s for sure.
This film also holds special meaning for me, because Grazia is my mom’s name and “La Grazia” is what she was called while I was growing up, as we lived in Florence by then, not in her native Naples. Putting the article before a name is a very Tuscan thing to do. I was “la Nina” so you get the idea. Sorrentino is also a fellow Parthenopean, as people who were born in Naples are known. Remember Sorrentino’s 2024 film Parthenope, where the goddaughter of Italian shipping magnate Achille Lauro was christened in honor of the city of Naples? Yup, that’s Parthenope, the city of Naples, which its inhabitants joke about by saying “Vedi Napoli e poi muori” — “see Naples and die,” meaning it’s just so perfect, once you see it you can leave this world.
Naples is important in both my own life and Sorrentino’s work. It is a city of inexplicable chaos, where I remember on visits to my mom’s family being driven by my cousin onto the city’s sidewalks, in his customized BMW, and speeding through red lights, while stopping politely at the green traffic lights, clearly giving us the right of way. Things never make sense in Naples and that’s part of its charm. In comedian Maurizio Crozza’s sketches about Sorrentino, he jokes that the filmmaker writes his ideas down on small scraps of paper and then puts those in the washing machine, thus posting them on his refrigerator. And that’s how he comes up with the plots of his films. Crozza may be right, since it definitely takes a special kind of breathing to watch a Sorrentino film, and that’s just the beginning.
During my childhood visits to Naples, I also remember seeing preserved cadavers and body parts in the basement of the Chapel of Sansevero, a functioning church on the upper deck and a sort of Dr. Frankenstein laboratory down below. I wondered as a child how Church and Science, both in capital letters of course, could be so nearby, almost walking hand in hand together in Naples. But Parthenope is a city of otherworldly experiences, where San Gennaro’s blood melts “miraculously” on the patron saint’s day — probably the result of a dangerously high number of people crowded into the Cathedral of Napoli, all breathing hot air onto the tiny glass vial.
Toni Servillo in a still from ‘La Grazia’, photo by © Andrea Pirrello
From the rumors surrounding La Grazia, I’ve picked out that the latest of Sorrentino’s highly anticipated films was shot, perhaps partially or as a whole, in Turin, a city on the north-eastern side of Italy’s boot. There were crews caught by reporters around the Accademia delle Scienze in the city, and the filmmaker was particularly impressed by the Sala dei Mappamondi, a gorgeous room decorated in 1787 by Giovannino Galliari — the artist offspring hailing from a famous family of Milanese painters and stage designers.
Usually, and also in the case of my mom’s name, a “grazia” is a grace received, when you ask God and the saints, or even the rabbis, to bestow a miracle on you and your loved ones. Legend goes that my grandfather Ettore received such a grace before my mom was born, though no one ever found out what it was. And so little Grazia was named — half of a set of adorable chubby fraternal twins, of which she wore a constant frown and her little brother Michele wore a smile. “Core cuntento 'a loggia,” they called little Miki, after a song by Sergio Bruni. The literal translation? “He seems like a happy heart in the loggia," yet another cryptic saying, courtesy of the Neapolitans. To those wondering, Mom is still a bit cranky, though not chubby at all these days. Think a Neapolitan Diana Vreeland…
Alberto Barbera, the artistic director of the Venice Film Festival, said: “I am very happy that the 82nd Venice International Film Festival will open with the new and highly anticipated film by Paolo Sorrentino. I like to recall that one of the most important and internationally acclaimed Italian auteurs made his debut right here at the Biennale di Venezia in 2001 with his first film, One Man Up, in my early years as the Artistic Director. The relationship with the Venice Film Festival became consolidated over the years with the presentation out of competition of the first episodes in the series The Young Pope (seasons one and two) and, above all, with The Hand of God which, in 2021, won the Silver Lion-Grand Jury Prize. Paolo Sorrentino’s return in competition comes with a film destined to leave its mark for its great originality and powerful relevance to the present time, which the audiences of the Venice Film Festival will have the pleasure of discovering on opening night.”
A last bit of information. When I opened the image of Sorrentino, which I’ve used, cropped, in the header above, it said “Paolo Sorrentino by Avedon,” which seemed strange as the American photographer extraordinaire has been dead 20 plus years and Sorrentino seems captured in recent years. Another miracle from San Gennaro, I thought. Instead, it turns out that Richard Avedon has an artistic grandson, Michael Avedon, who uses many of his late granddad’s techniques to continue in the family’s legacy. So you see, talking about my own mother’s connection to this year’s Venice opener is perfectly appropriate here. It’s all a family affair these days!
La Grazia, written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, is a Fremantle film produced by The Apartment, a Fremantle Company, by Numero 10, and by PiperFilm that will distribute it in Italy. MUBI owns worldwide rights, excluding Italy. The Match Factory is handling international sales.
The Venice International Film Festival will run from August 27 to September 6th, 2025, on the Lido di Venezia.
Images courtesy of La Biennale, used with permission.