Italy’s best film of the year opens an old wound

Award-winning film revisits real-life drama

Italy’s The Negotiator (Il Nibbio) was a double winner at Golden Globe Awards, held at the prestigious Sala della Protomoteca on Rome’s Capitoline Hill.  It walked away with Best Film and its lead actor Claudio Santamaria won Best Actor.

This is only the second film for director Alessandro Tonda (maker of The Shift and the TV series Summertime and Suburraeterna). They jury noted “the courage involved in bringing a recent event, which is still very fresh in our collective memory, to the big screen”.

The story centres around real-life Italian negotiator Nicola Calipari and his role in a complex Iraqi hostage crisis in what the jury called “a tense, emotional and socially engaged film”.

(Michael Leahy. Source: Cineuropa et al. Photo: Notorious Pictures (Italy))