The Bif&st in Bari has announced its 2026 programme. Among the Italian titles is Cattiva Strada by Davide Angiuli, starring Giulio Beranek and Malich Cissé. The cinematography of this ‘sincere and hard-hitting coming-of-age story’ (MyMovies) is by Emilio M. Costa CCS.
Set in Bari, in an atmosphere dominated by the neon lights of the stadium, Donato is searching for a way to pay for the expensive medical treatment of his grandmother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s. Trapped in the Albanian petty crime scene and caught in a spiral of dangerous offences, he must choose between saving himself and saving the people he loves. Distributed by Notorious Pictures, Cattiva Strada will be released in cinemas on Thursday 26 March, after its premiere at the Bif&st.
Emilio M. Costa CCS told us:
«The film arose from the need to portray a condition of survival — both physical and emotional — in an extreme nocturnal Bari, violent in its colours, contrasts and situations, within a day of suspended melancholy that I wanted to characterise through a strongly stylised visual approach. I wanted an image that was brutal and fragile at the same time, with a raw and unstable texture, never reassuring, founded on a stark separation between black and colour: black as a definitive space that devours information, and colour as an apparition emerging from that darkness, creating a harsh boundary between presence and absence. I chose to build this language directly during the shoot, in a handcrafted way, with a low-budget set and a very lean crew, avoiding delegating the look to post-production. I worked with an ARRI Alexa 35 at ISO 2000, combining signal amplification with the new internal textures: the high ISO makes the image more stressed and fragile, with shadows that fall off quickly and lose their gradation, while the textures render this loss of definition organic and material, as if the surface of the image itself were worn away by the story. I also operated the camera myself, which reinforced the decision to use almost exclusively a single lens — the Schneider Xenon 50mm T1 — not only for practical reasons but also for conceptual ones: I wanted to depict a world that never changes perspective, that remains always the same, with no possibility of visual escape. After I shared this reasoning with him, Massimo Proietti of D-Vision Movie People suggested this lens, and I believe it was the perfect choice, because the lens also exhibits a very marked progression of artefacts as the aperture changes: wide open the image is more fragile and soft; stopping down two or three stops radically changes the texture, increasing the structure and altering the nature of the edges. This allowed me to modulate the internal tension of the frame without changing optics, maintaining perceptual coherence while varying the quality of the visual material. In only two shots did I use a wide-angle lens, at a narrative moment where a different breath and a more open image were needed: precisely because the entire film is built on a constant gaze, that variation becomes perceptually significant. The lighting was conceived in continuity with these choices: direct, harsh, saturated, with areas of darkness left uncompensated, so that the contrast would be real rather than simulated. At night this produces an unsettling image in which colour erupts violently from the black; during the day it creates a dry, stylised melancholy, where the hardness of the light meets a visual texture that is vibrant and never polished. The aesthetic is therefore not a later intervention but an original condition of the image itself: the tension, brutality and precariousness of the characters are inscribed directly on its surface. ».
TECHNICAL DETAILS:
Digital colour DCP
Camera: ARRI ALEXA 35
Lenses: 50mm Schneider Xenon T1, Cooke T2.3 18–90mm Techno
Aspect ratio: 2.21:1
Gaffer: Nico Saponaro
Key grip: Lorenzo Colucci
1st AC: Franco Baratti
Colourist: Paolo Buonpane
Rental: D-Vision Movie People
