Corsica took center stage at the Cannes Film Festival. After A Son Image, Thierry de Peretti's chronicle of a burning era on the Isle of Beauty (in cinemas since September 4), it's Julien Colonna 's turn to unveil his island film. His first feature film, Le Royaume, will be released on November 13, 2024.
Both directors set out to depict their vision of the island on which they grew up. For Julien Colonna, this takes the form of a gangster film. A work of fiction inspired in large part by his personal story, it depicts a deeply moving filial relationship in the midst of a gang war bathed in vengeance and death.
Corsica, 1995. Lesia (Ghjuvanna Benedetti) is spending her first summer as a teenager with her boyfriend at the beach. One day, a man bursts in and takes her by motorcycle to an isolated villa in the middle of the Corsican scrubland, where she finds her father (Saveriu Santucci) in hiding, surrounded by his men. A war breaks out in the underworld, and the clan led by her father is forced into hiding.
Drama looms, death strikes, decimating the madmen of this chess game in millimetric fashion, in the hope of reaching the king of this kingdom. And so begins a road-movie-like escapade in which father and daughter learn to look at, understand and love each other, moving from hideout to hideout, from villas overlooking the sea to run-down campsites.
With its all-Corsican cast and actors, some of whom are non-professionals (Saveriu Santucci is a farmer and mountain guide in real life; all of them are extremely accurate), Le Royaume places the viewer as a privileged witness to the actions and reactions inside this high-tension Corsican clan. But without ever lapsing into voyeuristic folklore.
In fact, it's a most interesting narrative choice to offer a young, female point of view in this man's world - so far outside this codified milieu that she makes naive errors of appreciation. Or how the young girl carves out a place for herself among these overprotective males, from the quasi-initial cutting up of a wild boar in the wilderness to the innocence that gradually leaves heradulescent eyes.Adulthood comes knocking.
At the heart of this apprenticeship film, Lesia learns the rules and traditions of the community into which she was born, piercing the secrets and unspoken words of her father, who tries against all odds to preserve her. Behind this whodunit that moves forward, it's the father-daughter relationship that touches the heart.
"Through this filial relationship that struggles to exist in a context where everything is dying, I wanted to show thuggery in its inevitable programmed extinction. To depict these men as the penitents of their own existence, carrying their cross to the point of collapse," explains Julien Colonna. We couldn't agree more.
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