Blood and the Moon

Tommaso Cotronei was born in a small town in Calabria, in Southern Italy, where, still very young, started to work in the fields with his parents in the rural countryside. Struck by a place that gives no hopes but backbreaking labour, no chances of wishing for something different, Cotronei finds the strength to flee from his situation at 21. He spends several years looking for something that would suit his hopes while temporarly working as a manual worker in Northern Europe. Getting into the humanities he attends classes at the Philosophy Department at University of Rome La Sapienza, without graduating. In 1993, he luckily becomes the film director Vittorio De Seta's assistant, while the former was working on his film Calabria. In 1997, he films his first oeuvre, Nel Blu Cercando Fiabe (In the Blue Looking for Fairy-tales). Cotronei's gaze is not the distant gaze of the ethnologist, far from the “people”; he does not tease the audience to look at manifestations of subaltern, traditional life as “picturesque”, with a smile or complacent interest. Cotronei's gaze stares at parents' anguish while they are looking at their children condemned to lead the same, forsaken existence.