Tommaso

Tommaso is an American living in Rome. He is working on a movie script and teaches acting – which is sometimes merely breathing and moving in space. Every once in a while, he attends an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. His relationship with Nikki, mother of their three-year-old child, appears increasingly strained. Has their considerable age difference become an issue? Tommaso is Nikki’s senior by more than thirty years. His life and work, musings and attempts to grapple with the Italian language are nourished by a vital eroticism, as strongly embodied by iconic New York actor Willem Dafoe. In one of TOMMASO’s crucial scenes, he sits with some outcasts from Italian society and literally takes his heart out: “It’s all I have”. It’s an emblematic gesture strongly rooted in the physical religion of Abel Ferrara.
The maverick Italian-American filmmaker, who found a second artistic home in the country of his origins, tells the story of male (if not macho) truth-seeker in the Eternal City and ends up not even shying away from the strongest of occidental images: a man on the cross. Has Willem Dafoe, more than thirty years after appearing in the same way for Scorsese, become the ultimate incarnation of the man from Nazareth? Or the ultimate quotation? (Bert Rebhandl)

In the presence of Abel Ferrara, Anna Ferrara and Cristina Chiriac.