IL MORSO DEL RAMARRO

Grand Prix for the Best Feature Film

Directed by
Maria Lodovica Marini

• Overview

A lively crime story set in the streets and palaces of a shiny and restless Liguria.

A vivid late-summer sunlight in Chiavari, a tidy and clean Ligurian city on the sea.

The liberty-style palace is home to most of the characters and their stories, which entangle and solve with joyful irony leading to the solution of the enigma. It all starts with a locket, a green lizard-shaped one.

Three rich and bored scions – Carlo, Giorgio and Lapo – decide to break into an apartment, a thrilling experience in their empty days. Their second target is Giovanni Greco's house, an old and refined, yet grouchy, teacher, who spends most of his time in a city retirement house as "external guest". He has three friends here: Gritta (a cheerful fisherman), Dandy (a Latin-lover chemist) and Fran (a retired sea master)

Despite the accuracy in the details, the robbery fails: the three men are caught on the spot by the professor and his Peruvian caregiver, Marisol. After a short fight, she curses the thieves and runs after them, but she's accidentally run over by a car and falls into a coma.

As a result of an inquiry carried out by the four old men and the new ER Doctor Filippo Tosi on one side and by the Professor's neighbour Virginia on the other, the three thefts are identified.

While Marisol's conditions are stable, new characters enter the story – the aunt Fedora, the young Misia, the nurse Beppe, Virginia's ex husband Leonardo and, above all, Carlo's butler Edwin. The latter is a silent and peculiar man with a perfect pitch, who cuts out newspaper articles.

The three guys are unmasked and "punished": they waste all the profits of their thefts because of the butler, who seizes their foreign bank account.

The city of Chiavari is told in all its features, hence the portrait of a fascinating place with breath-taking views. Only when you visit Chiavari you can realize and appreciate this wonderful city.

Last but not least, the food: the description of pesto's preparation by the author is so tasty that it feels like you're really tasting it!