Ostia

A group of men find a woman lying unconscious in the grass and carry her to two brothers, who are living in their childhood home. The three of them duly embark upon a game that explores the many gradations between attraction and repulsion. Based on a screenplay co-written with Pasolini, Citti tells the story of drifters in search of themselves, whose internal unease shapes the ways in which they treat one another; violence is always latent. Citti devotes as much time to the characters as he does to the city and beach landscapes of Ostia, a suburb of Rome. Incest, rape, sexual orientation, patricide – these people’s experiences lies between the rules of Catholicism and the motives of psychoanalysis, and are acted out in a symbiosis of documentary images and theatrical burlesque: cynical and tender, frivolous and dark, full of broken taboos. (Berlinale)