With ‘The Hand of God,’ Director Paolo Sorrentino Pens an Ode to His Youth

variety.com:

Bob Verini Of the five 2021 Academy Award nominees for best international film, Italy’s entry, “The Hand of God,” most directly combines two of cinema’s most treasured themes: intensely personal autobiography that is able to speak to a wider audience, and the art of filmmaking itself.Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino uses the character of 16-year-old Fabietto Schisa — played by newcomer Filippo Scotti — to examine the real-life experiences that led to his own growth as a man as well as his eventual birth as a filmmaker.Watching audiences connect so deeply with a character that is drawn so closely from his own experiences has hit Sorrentino deeply. “Now that it’s more than one year that I shot the movie, I have to say that it’s strange, because now I am sharing my pain with a big audience,” he shares. “It’s like, now my story is not my story; it’s a story that belongs to everybody that watches the movie.” It’s not only audiences who have connected with the story of young Fabietto: IndieWire’s David Ehrlich called the project a “tremblingly personal movie,” by the end of which “Sorrentino shows us how he made that life into his reality.” Released worldwide by Netflix, “The Hand of God” picked up four awards at the Venice Film Festival, including the coveted Silver Lion.The acclaim came as no surprise to the filmmaker’s collaborators.

To Luisa Ranieri, who plays Aunt Patrizia, Sorrentino is “the kind of director who comes only once in 50 years. One who can actually create their own language.”“The Hand of God” is set in the 1980s, though our only real clue is the headphones constantly attached to Fabietto’s cassette player. “My idea,” Sorrentino reports, “was to do a movie set in the ’80s, but without giving too much.