Meshing meticulously researched archive footage of Genoa with the tender portrait of a contemporary love story, Mouth of the Wolf offers a genre-defying blend of poetry, documentary and fictionalised biography.

Director Pietro Marcello’s surprising starting point for this stunning film was a commission from the San Marcellino Foundation, a Jesuit organisation helping homeless and destitute people in the harbour district of Genoa. The intention was not so much to document the work of the foundation as to evoke the world in which it works, the people it strives to help and, most importantly, the city itself - Genoa, a “northern town that always looked southward”. The end product is a deeply poetic meditation on love, urban living and the demise of the shipping and fishing industries.

While researching the area in which the film is set, Marcello met Enzo, the charismatic, macho ex-con whose unlikely love story with Mary, a transsexual former heroine addict, gives the film its beating heart. Enzo and Mary’s love, as surprisingly tender as it is fierce, blossomed in prison and flourished through decades of hardship and separation. It is evoked through interviews and love letters, read in voice-over, which blend seamlessly into the film’s delicate soundtrack.

This assured debut has garnered much critical praise and festival awards, and deservedly so. Though impossible to categorise, Mouth of the Wolf is a rare tour de force, a lyrical, hauntingly beautiful work of art that remains accessible and unpretentious throughout.
 

Director's Profile

Pietro Marcello was born in Italy in 1976. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples. His short documentary films have won several awards; La Bocca del Lupo is his first feature film.

Filmography

2007 Il passaggio della linea (short)
2005 La Baracca (short)
2004 Il cantiere (short)
2003 Carta (short film); Scampia (short)