VENTO DI TERRA

As in his debut film, “Sailing Home,” Vincenzo Marra uses nonprofessional actors and a restrained yet fluid style to tell the story of an unlucky Italian family. Lodged in the depressed working-class neighborhood of Naples, there isn?t much of a future for 18-year-old Vincenzo Pacilli or his sister. Their father is in poor health, and their mother works non-stop as a seamstress and fends off the landlord trying to evict them. After a brief foray into crime, Vincenzo joins the army, but it brings him no satisfaction and takes him away from the family. A stint in Kosovo in 1999 will change Vincenzo?s life forever. Marra?s filmmaking is firmly in the realist tradition; many of his scenes are wordless, the drama freighted by bursts of sound or soundless vistas. You won?t believe that Vincenzo Pacilli is a nonprofessional actor?his quiet intensity keeps the film?s tension without slipping into melodrama.