Genre: Drama

Language: Italian with English Subtitles

Director: Riccardo Milani

Cast: Michele Placido, Silvio Orlando, Claudio Santamaria & Paola Cortellesi

Released: 2003

Duration: 106 Minutes

Rating: M contains offensive language

Distribution: Adriana Chiesa Enterprises

Winner 2003 Montreal World Film festival: Best Actor.

A variation on the socially engaged cinema of Ken Loach and of the political cinema of Italian directors Petri, Rosi and Bellocchio, Riccrado Milani’s film weds comedy and drama and the personal and the political in his dramatization of a real event, the closing down of an American owned tire factory in the small mountain town of Campolaro in the Abruzzo region of Italy. The film interweaves the personal stories of the workers and their families with the progress of the organized rebellion. The central characters span the generations from Salvatore, a dedicated trade union member who remembers the organized movements of the past but is unable to comprehend either the musical tastes or computer skills of his 18 year old son; to Antonio (Silvio Orlando), the main character, a dreamer who still searches for bears in the wilderness and hopes to lure his girlfriend back from big city life in Milan; to Mario, who desperately in need of money starts producing fresh pasta with the wives of his friends. Both brutal and sentimental, The Soul’s Haven explores a gamut of human relationships and a changing Italian economic, political and geographical landscape while continuing to pay homage to long-standing local traditions.

What Italian critics have pronounced ‘a choral and sincere film which combines the familiar with a new fresh outlook’, Milani’s film privileges the development of his characters and extracts great performances from his main actors, Silvio Orlando (The son’s room, Light of my eyes), Michele Placido (A journey called love) and Claudio Santamaria.