A Ciambra
A CIAMBRA, drama, rated R, in Italian with subtitles, The Screen, 2.5 chiles
Jonas Carpignano’s follow-up to his 2016 feature debut Mediterranea, about the grim fortunes of African immigrants in Italy, is a family affair. He plucked Pio Amato, the spunky preteen delinquent from that film, put him at the center of his own movie, and surrounded him with his real-life family of Romany Gypsies, who are now living in urban housing confinement in the Calabrian town of Gioia Tauro. The end credits of A
Ciambra fill the screen with Amatos playing themselves, including Pio’s father, grandfather, sisters, and long-suffering mother.
Pio is now a chain-smoking, beer-drinking fourteen-year-old, and he yearns to be a grownup and break into the family business. Breaking in is, in fact, an aspect of the family business, along with stealing cars and other petty theft, and when his older brother Cosimo and his father Rocco are hauled off to jail, Pio steps up. Some of it he handles well, some not so well.
His best friend and mentor is Ayiva (Koudous Seihon), an immigrant from Burkina Faso who was the central character of Mediterranea. Ayiva, who looks like a soulful Chuck Berry, also operates on the fringes of the law, but has an innate decency, which provides a bit of role modeling for the kid. He is also at the center of the film’s heart-wrenching moral dilemma, an agonizing decision that Pio must make.
Carpignano has been around the Amato family for years. He made a short film (also called A Ciambra) with much of the same cast in 2014, and the family seems at ease around his camera. Some of his focus is on the racist hierarchy that allows the downtrodden Romanies to feel superior to the even lower-tier Africans, while they themselves function as vassals to “the Italians,” the better-dressed local mobsters who assign them criminal jobs.
The movie opens with a gentle fantasy of better days for the Romany clan. Out in a misty field, a man harnesses a beautiful grey horse, and that horse and man appear again from time to time in imagination through the movie, sometimes clopping through the empty streets of Gioia Tauro, sometimes by a campfire in the open landscape. “When we were on the road,” Pio’s doddering grandfather tells him, “we were free.” The man with the horse is the grandfather’s younger self, and he trails a dream of the lost nobility that freedom had to offer. — Jonathan Richards