Monica Bellucci Stirs Locarno with Ketticè — Sicilian Drama

She didn’t come to Locarno to play it safe. Monica Bellucci walked the festival circuit this year with Ketticè, a film that quietly upends expectations simply by refusing easy labels.

Set in Palermo in 2012, during the fraught years of Berlusconi’s shadow over Italy, Ketticè is a coming-of-age drama that leans into family tension and social unease. Giovanni Tortorici writes and directs a story that orbits Giulio, a drifting teenager, and his neighbor Keti, two young people trying to pry open a window to freedom while grown-ups keep slamming doors. It’s intimate. It’s tense. It’s full of small, telling details.

Bellucci plays Giulio’s mother — an aristocratic Sicilian woman trapped by brittle social codes and a perfectionism that has calcified into cruelty. Her performance refuses melodrama. Instead, she offers a portrait of quiet disintegration: a woman who masks failure behind ritual and habit, who numbs herself with overeating and channels disappointment into bursts of hysteria. It’s tragic and oddly comic at once, like watching a statue crack under sunlight.

There’s also a political undertone. Tortorici paints a Palermo where nostalgia and troubling hero-worship bubble up among some youths, where historical amnesia and empty bravado rub shoulders with everyday life. The film doesn’t sermonize. It holds a mirror to cultural echoes, and that reflection is often uncomfortable.

Luca Guadagnino’s name sits on the production credits, a detail that has amplified interest, but Ketticè firmly belongs to its director and its cast of young actors. Bellucci praised Tortorici and the newcomers in a press briefing, calling the shoot “a rare artistic journey.” The cinematography by Camilla Catabrigia is worth noting: her camera lingers on domestic corners and Palermo’s weathered façades, turning private ruptures into widescreen landscapes of feeling.

What stays with you after the screening is less the plot than the emotional geography: a generation caught between inertia and impulse, parents policing moral appearances while their children search for exit routes. The film maps that terrain with a surgeon’s patience and a poet’s eye.

Locarno’s seventy-ninth edition has room for many voices. Ketticè arrives as one that whispers and then demands attention, carried by a performance from Bellucci that is restrained, sharp, and stubbornly human.