The Longest Night of the Year

During the longest night of the year, the stories, anxieties and issues of our characters graze each other without ever meeting; personal events accelerate and destinies suddenly fall. How many stories and how many showdowns can occur during the winter solstice in a small town?

Director
Simone Aleandri

Film Subject
Andrea Di Consoli

Script
Andrea Di Consoli, Simone Aleandri e Cristina Borsatti

Casting
Stefania De Santis

General Manager
Antonio Tozzi

Director of Production
Cesare Augusto Di Patti

Script Supervisor
Doriana Bonora

Assistant Director
Enzo Russo

Costumes
Beatrice Giannini

Scenography
Valerio Romano

Live Sound Engineer
Gian Domenico Petillo e Marco Lassalaz

Editing
Alessio Doglione

Director of Photography
Vincenzo Carpineta

Camera Operator
Antonello Sarao

Original Soundtrack
Antonio Deodati e Unaderosa

Sound Design
Riccardo Cimino e Ignazio Vellucci

Executive Director in Basilicata
Angelo Viggiano per Sirio Studios

Produced by
Sandro Bartolozzi

A Production of
CLIPPER MEDIA con RAI CINEMA

Distributed by
VISION DISTRIBUTION

Length
90 Minutes

Press Office
Nicoletta Gemmi

Press Office Vision Distribution
Emanuela Semeraro

Press Materials
Download Press Book
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The film takes place all in one night: the longest night of the year, between 21 and 22 December (winter solstice). The sun sets around 16.30 and rises the next day at 7.30. A long night in a small provincial town, in which four personal stories unfold alongside each other. A politician one step away from his fall, a go-go dancer who has decided to change her life, a boy who is involved in a relationship with an older woman and three twenty-year-olds without ambitions in search of strong emotions. In the background, the tired and benevolent gaze of Sergio, the elderly gas station attendant who – in the petrol station open all night – watches over this small world. Fifteen hours of uninterrupted darkness in which the human destiny unfolds, since the night causes the inhibition of the day to be lost and events suddenly accelerate.

Cast Artistico

Sergio: Mimmo Mignemi
Luce: Ambra Angiolini
Johnny: Luigi Fedele
Damiano: Francesco Di Napoli
Enzo: Michele Eburnea
Pepè: Nicolò Galasso
Francesco: Massimo Popolizio
Padre di Luce: Alessandro Haber
Isabella: Anna Ammirati
Marito di Isabella: Antonio Petrocelli
Felicia: Aglaia Mora
Carmine: Pascal Zullino
Filippo Cerverizzo: Matteo Carlomagno
Disc jockey: Fabio Pompili
Driver disc jockey: Pietro Sarubbi

With the participation of Massimo De Francovich in the role of Presidente

Director’s Notes

A handful of lights scattered in the dark: this is how Potenza appears when you reach it in the night, after driving along the Basentana state road. The city, at first glance, seems to hide itself in its layers of heavy, vertical buildings, in the ups and downs of elevated roads, endless escalators and desolate bridges. Its immobility is striking. It seems to be broken only by the perpetual movement of the wind turbines, which act as a belt for the entire urban landscape. A border town scenario, apparently modest, which hangs over the lives of those who live there and which arouses great feelings, amplified by the loneliness and the night.

“The longest night of the year” is a film that I as imagined realistic, sentimental, “modern”, visceral, where destinies suddenly fall together into a limited space-time. This is not a thesis film. Its strength lies instead in the construction of intense stories that put the humanity of the characters at the center. It shows a profound humanity, fueled by melancholy and loneliness, in a framed but universal place, in whose apparent immobility there are people who at that moment, on that night, are experiencing something big. Because something big always happens, everywhere, even in places that seem motionless.

The development proceeds within a circular macrostructure in which the stories go alongside each other without ever really intertwining.

The style is simple and generates emotional closeness in the description of the characters, and of greater breadth and suspension in those of the setting.

The final shattering of our stories does not refer to a puzzle and its fragments, but to an explosion and its splinters: these represent a scattered reality across a southern town in its longest night.