The Hand of God – Meant to be
After Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, it’s the turn of yet another high-caliber filmmaker to receive a carte blanche from streaming giant Netflix. Following the trend of other films produced by the controversial streaming platform, The Hand of God, Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film, had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Jury Grand Prize and the Marcello Mastroianni Award for best debutant actor. In a fashion that is opposite to the typical evolutionary path of a director, the film is a coming-of-age story that distances itself from Sorrentino’s prior preoccupation with excessive protagonists, corrupt politicians, or decadent writers. If this sounds a bit like Cinema Paradiso, the biopic of another Italian director that fictionalized his calling for cinema through the medium of adolescence, The Hand of God resists the temptations of sentimentalism and gives itself to a form that is similar to memory, cobbled together from fragments connected to each other with fragility.
Film critic and programmer, she collaborates with various international film festivals. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Senses of Cinema, Kinoscope, Indiewire, Film Comment, Vague Visages and Desistfilm. In Spanish she has written for Caimán Cuadernos de Cine and in Romanian she collaborates with FILM magazine. Programmer and coordinator of Tenerife Shorts.
