Screened as part of NZIFF 2015

Reality 2012

Directed by Matteo Garrone

This headlong satire of television in Berlusconi-land won Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah) the Cannes Grand Prix. “The rare movie that has some of that old, classic Fellini insanity in its overheated blood.” — Entertainment Weekly

France / Italy In Italian with English subtitles
115 minutes DCP

Director

Producers

Domenico Procacci
,
Matteo Garrone

Screenplay

Maurizio Braucci
,
Ugo Chiti
,
Matteo Garrone
,
Massimo Gaudioso

Photography

Marco Onorato

Editor

Marco Spoletini

Production designer

Paolo Bonfini

Costume designer

Maurizio Millenotti

Music

Alexandre Desplat

With

Aniello Arena (Luciano)
,
Loredana Simioli (Maria)
,
Nando Paone (Michele)
,
Graziella Marina (Luciano’s mother)
,
Nello Iorio (Massimone)
,
Nunzia Schiano (aunt Nunzia)
,
Rosaria D’Urso (aunt Rosaria)
,
Giuseppina Cervizzi (Giusy)
,
Claudia Gerini (presenter)
,
Raffaele Ferrante (Enzo)

Festivals

Cannes (In Competition) 2012

Awards

Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival 2012

Elsewhere

Plunging us headlong into celebrity mania, this energetic satire of the transforming power of television in Berlusconi-land won Matteo Garrone his second Cannes Grand Prix. Tragicomic, carnivalesque and character-centred, it could not be more different in tone from his previous winner, the sober, epic Gomorrah.

“A fixture of his village and large family sprawled across a charming, crumbly structure at the head of the town square, Luciano is dragged away from work (well, from his side gig orchestrating the black-market trade of kitchen ‘robots’) by a pleading call from his young daughters, demanding he come down to the mall and try out for Big Brother… Then Luciano gets a call-back, which involves a psychiatric evaluation. It goes well, or so Luciano thinks (‘They were, like, “Stop, that’s enough”,’ he brags to his family), and he goes back to Napoli certain he’s won a place on the show, a conviction only strengthened when strangers start visiting the fish market – Luciano can only assume they’re spies sent ‘from the TV’ to determine that he truly deserves a slot in the Big Brother house… If the syndrome of ‘Big Brother Shock’ was the social disease of the Berlusconi era… as a satirical portrait of that era and that disease, Reality’s real subversion is in preserving a moment of madness for future generations.” — Karina Longworth, LA Weekly

“The perils of appearing on reality television are well-rehearsed by now, but Matteo Garrone must be the first filmmaker to address the perils of not appearing on it… It is also a blistering parable about the dangers of faith, and Garrone plays up to the story’s religious parallels with relish.” — Robbie Collin, The Telegraph