The Atlanta Film Festival will host the world premiere of Montedoro, Italian director Antonello Faretta's first feature film competing in the Narrative Features section at the 39th edition of the prestigious American festival.

After a long period of preparation and field work - almost seven years of writing, filming and post-production work - on the 28th March, Montedoro, the only Italian feature film in competition, will be screened at 2.30pm at the Plaza Theatre in Atlanta, one of the oldest cinemas of the United States. The author of the film Antonello Faretta and the protagonist Pia Marie Mann will say a few
words at the screening.

The film is produced by Noeltan Film Studio - in collaboration with Todos Contentos Y Yo Tambien, Rattapallax Films Usa, Astrolabio Brazil, Regione Basilicata and the European Union with the support of the Lucana Film Commission, APT Basilicata and the Craco Society - and is set and filmed entirely in the ghost town of Craco (in Basilicata, southern Italy, the site already being protected by the World Monuments Fund), among the Badlands of Aliano and Matera, the so-called Città dei Sassi (City of Stones), which a few months ago was proclaimed European Capital of Culture for 2019.

Montedoro is inspired by the true story of Pia Marie Mann, an Italian-American woman actually born in Craco and given up for adoption at the age four to a family in New York. The film relates this woman's journey between two worlds: the United States and an archaic and magical Italy of the south. A journey that, through the search for personal identity, becomes a journey of
reconstruction of a collective identity that by then was extinct. By following her biological mother's trail, the protagonist unknowingly goes in search of her Motherland.

"Montedoro was born from passion, necessity and encounters," states the director Antonello Faretta. "The main stimulus was a place, Craco in fact, which I believe is the protagonist in the film as much as Pia. It is a highly metaphorical place that was abandoned after a slow landslide that culminated in 1963. For me this enchanting place little by little became a symbol of the discomfort and frustration that I feel as a citizen of this world, annihilated by a sensation of fatigue and impotence against the catastrophic times we are confronted with. In the midst of this discomfort, by sheer coincidence, I met Pia Marie Mann, a brave woman suspended between two worlds, between one life and another."

Trailer, photos, film clips, press kit, biography of the director and all updates about the film on MontedoroFilm.it