Review of   Ignazio Venzano Ignazio Venzano

Un mondo a parte

(Film, 2024)

This time Antonio Albanese takes on the character of an elementary school teacher who wants to renew his career by focusing on moving from a big city to a remote village in Abruzzo. He comes there believing he can change the world and of course it will be the opposite. Even some of the students know more than him about what and how to do with computer science. The plot is inspired by the decline in birth rates, which is depopulating the small inland towns. Every year a certain number of schools disappear (this year 145). These are the points where there are still physically buildings intended to collect children. While, far away, further and further away, there is a school management with a secretariat. Here the manager even tries to close the town center where Albanese is doing his first year of service as a transfer, to benefit the school where he lives. Perhaps it is unlikely that it could actually happen, but the story highlights an entirely Italian, little-known absurdity: the "school institutions" with a Head of School are much fewer than the "schools" where the service is provided. 

The vice-principal stands out in the story, as she wants at all costs to keep the school active in her small town. To this end, various expedients will be put into practice. Her acting is excellent: Virginia Raffaele here proves to be convinced and convincing of what she wants to do. She is obviously excellent as always, Albanian, in a partly bucolic background (with wolves and so on) in a little-known Abruzzo but present, with the obvious differences, also in other parts of our hinterland