Canada’s annual Contemporary Italian Film Festival recently showed a riveting film that has earned success in Italy and abroad. Inspired by true events, Salvo Cuccia’s Lo Scambio takes place in Palermo during the mid-90s when violent organized crime was at its peak. The film centers on a husband and wife in their mid-40s. He is a police commissioner consumed by his work and she longs for a child, becoming obsessed with the story of a boy who was kidnapped by the mafia in retaliation for his father becoming an informant. Cuccia presents the story of the commissioner’s work and the never-ending, lonely days of his wife in parallel sequences of delusion and stark reality. Cuccia said of this surreal style, “I wanted to make a movie about a crime that really happened, but that was more than just the account of a news report of the time. I was interested in exploring the nature of the characters and the situations in order to bring out a drama that stoo...
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