PODCAST | Samantha Sartori interviews Pierfrancesco Favino, actor of the film The Traitor.

To listen to the interview, click on the ► icon on the right, just above the picture

We met Pierfrancesco Favino at the 57th New York Film Festival. Marco Bellocchio – whose debut film Fists in the Pocket premiered at the 3rd New York Film Festival (1965) – and star Pierfrancesco Favino brought their unconventional mob drama The Traitor to the festival. Italy’s Oscar entry will open on January 31st 2020 at Film at Lincoln Center, New York.

The Traitor: Pierfrancesco Favino commands the screen throughout this decades-spanning true-life narrative as Tommaso Buscetta, the mafia boss turned informant who helped take down a large swath of organised crime leaders in Sicily in the eighties. In one fully realised, impressively staged scene after another, including the notorious Maxi Trial, overseen by Judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi), Bellocchio interrogates received ideas about loyalty that so many other movies of this genre use to romanticise their characters. This is a very different kind of mafia drama, one that has the structure of a procedural but coasts on the waves of psychological portraiture. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

To discover more about the film, click here on the Film Festival website.