Drama, experimental, by Enrico Iannaccone, Italy, 2024.
After an eye examination, a young Neapolitan man discovers that he suffers from degenerative macular disease, a condition that will progressively lead to blindness. Forced to wear conspicuous glasses and increasingly isolated from the world around him, he spends his days speaking almost exclusively with his elderly father, whom he calls every day to make sure he has taken his medication for his heart problems. Plunged into loneliness and confusion, the young man begins to contemplate suicide and decides to buy a gun to put an end to both his own life and his father’s. But just as he is about to carry out his desperate plan, he happens to witness an assault that forces him to postpone his death.

Shot by Enrico Iannaccone using an iPhone 14 Pro and a bare-bones crew, *Riverbero* is a surreal and disorienting cinematic experiment, made in just nine days through an independent production involving a collective of film and theatre professionals. Naples becomes a suspended, almost unreal place, portrayed through dirty, grainy images, skewed framing and desolate settings that reflect the protagonist’s inner condition. Minimalism, irony and unease intertwine in a story strongly influenced by the world of Samuel Beckett, where time seems to lose its meaning and the anticipation of possible salvation becomes a way of questioning loneliness, memory and the boundaries of the mind. The original music by Iannaccone himself, released under the pseudonym Gianni Banni, accompanies a dreamlike and unsettling journey in which sounds, scents and memories merge into an indistinct emotional reverberation.

LANGUAGE: Italian
SUBTITLES: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese