“The Kingdom” – a languid and captivating anti-mafia film

Corsica, 1995. While Lesia (Ghjuvanna Benedetti) should be experiencing one of those summers rich in discovery, it’s to another first time that the young girl finds herself invited, a ritual explicitly detailed in an opening sequence where the young girl is initiated into hunting. It’s all about joining the pack, being hunter and hunted. The child of a wanted gangster, the young woman soon joins her father inside a villa that resembles a golden cage. The only link with the outside world is the television screen, which reports daily on the latest deaths in his mafia clan. This is the angle chosen by The Kingdom, a demystified and distanced observation of a world and its rules that Lesia glimpses, like a lookout behind loopholes, without initially being able to fully grasp.

The film unfolds at an almost apathetic but always captivating pace, shrouded in mystery, capturing with real power the funereal dance of these lives shattered by the weight of a legacy from ancient times. An inescapable tragedy, The Kingdom focuses above all on the study of a relationship between a father and daughter who can only truly meet, get to know each other and make up for lost time under the impetus of an imminent threat.

Traduction Emma Frigo