09/08/2022 - In the Italian director’s new comedy, produced by Lumière & Co., a man wakes up from a coma which he fell into during the funeral of Italian Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer

Walter Veltroni has wrapped filming on his new movie Quando [+see also:
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Shot in Rome and the Lazio region based on a screenplay by Doriana Leondeff, Simone Lenzi and Veltroni himself, the comedy sees Giovanni awaken from a coma 31 years after he was hit on the head by a flag during the funeral of the Italian Communist Party’s long-term leader Enrico Berlinguer in the summer of 1984. Everything has changed. The world he left behind him no longer exists: his family, his girlfriend, his beloved political party… Everything is in pieces in this new era. Giovanni is like a fifty-year-old child, he must learn how to manoeuvre in this new dimension, how to accept the loss of old bonds and how to forge new ones. He’s helped by Giulia, a young and tormented nun who took care of him in the later years of his hospitalisation, and Leo, a problematic boy with selective mutism. Thanks to them, Giovanni not only regains his normal vital functions, he also finds a way of understanding his new existence and facing up to the past, which will come back to him in the form of Francesca, his daughter from his previous life.

Veltroni directed a documentary entitled Quando c’era Berlinguer back in 2014, which recounted the life of the communist leader through testimonials from those who knew him, including Mikhail Gorbachev, the last secretary-general of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. His fiction feature film debut came about in 2019 by way of C'è tempo [+see also:
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Quando is produced by Lionello Cerri and Cristiana Mainardi alongside Lumière & Co., and will be distributed by Vision Distribution.

(Translated from Italian)