Backward (2010)

BACKWARD is a big, intense drama in which the many different life stories of a minor-league football team converge to create a collective plot. The 42 locations drift the audience from the enchanting Piedmont province (with its culture, its stones, its vineyards) to the skyscrapers of Los Angeles. The main characters are Martha, a young Italian-American manager (who inherited the football team from the dead father), and Gianni a former worldwide famous goalkeeper now reduced to the sad role of a glory of the past: a good man ruined by the alcoholic vice. Along with Gianni and Martha the entire little universe of a small football team is acting: each boy is protagonist of a story, carrying in the movie his own load of ambitions, expectations, hopes and delusions. The story runs through the last three months of the soccer championship season and, during that time, every character must face some inner fears, some inner demons: Christian (the best player) will remain paralyzed on a wheel-chair, Loris (the boss, the coolest) will be imprisoned and spend some days in jail, Anna (who betrays her sweet husband Daniele for Luke, the bastard one) will understand that to escape from responsibilities doesn't remove them... Even Martha - pushed by the sense of guilty toward her dead father (she doesn't want to disappoint his last wills) - and Gianni - who loves alcohol more than his dignity but is desperately seeking a kind of redemption - will have to deal with the very dark and intimate part of their souls: they will discover that, in life, when we you lose something perhaps you're winning something else. A simple, strong, honest movie painted with dark and bright lights that reflect the struggled souls of the characters: from the calm Italian hills to the chaotic skyscrapers of Los Angeles. It's not a sport movie or a soccer story: it's a drama about many young lives, in which the green football field remains just on the background. It's not an intellectual movie or a difficult, complex story: it's a simple, emotional and honest picture made with a high cinematography level. An intense and ambitious Italian work that wants to compete with the international standards.