The Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco is pleased to present, for the third meeting of the series From Page to Screen, The Hummingbird (Il colibrì), a 2022 film by Francesca Archibugi based on the novel of the same name by Sandro Veronesi.
Marco Carrera is like a Hummingbird, he uses all his energy to remain still. The one who triggers the revelation is Daniele Carradori, his wife’s psychotherapist, who contacts him to protect him from a mysterious “grave danger” that looms over his life. Marco has faced many grave dangers, and many are the losses that torment him; yet, despite the almost neurotic frenzy of his family, his wife and his friend Duccio, he remains still. Could it be a way of protecting himself from the chaos that surrounds him?
This defense mechanism, however, risks leaving him paralyzed, unable to recognize and communicate his own desires, unable to be honest even with himself. Perhaps this is why he has the courage to maintain only a purely platonic and exclusively epistolary relationship with Luisa Lattes, with whom he has been hopelessly in love since adolescence. Perhaps, however, his immobility will not be enough to make Marco less guilty, nor to protect him from the consequences of his inactions…
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The Hummingbird (Il colibrì)
Dir. Francesca Archibugi
Italy/France, 2022, 125 min
Cast: Pierfrancesco Favino, Kasia Smutniak, Bérénice Bejo, Laura Morante, Sergio Albelli, Fotinì Peluso, Alessandro Tedeschi, Benedetta Porcaroli, Massimo Ceccherini, Francesco Centorame, Pietro Ragusa, Valeria Cavalli, Nanni Moretti, Kasia Smutniak
In Italian with English subtitles
SYNOPSIS
This is the tale of the life of Marco Carrera, known as Colibrì or “the hummingbird”: a life of fateful coincidences, loss, and stories of absolute love.
The plot moves forward on the strength of recollections that allow us to leap from one period to another, from one era to another, in a fluid time ranging from the early 1970s to a near future…. > It is at sea that Marco meets Luisa Lattes, a beautiful, unusual young woman – a lifelong love never to be consummated and never to be extinguished.
His conjugal life will be a different one, in Rome, with Marina and their daughter Adele.
Marco will be hurled back to Florence by an implacable destiny that subjects him to the harshest tests. He will find Marina’s psychoanalyst Daniele Carradori to protect him and teach him how to accept the most unexpected changes of course.
Il Colibrì is the story of the ancestral force of life, of the arduous struggle we all make to withstand what at times appears intolerable – also by wielding the powerful weapons of illusion, happiness, and good cheer.