Historical Memory and Missed Queer Perspectives
by Dom Holdaway
Overview
September 8, 2022
130′
Gianni Amelio
Gianni Amelio, Edoardo Petti, Federico Fava
Kavac Film, IBC Movie, Tenderstories, Rai Cinema
Luan Amelio Ujkaj
Simona Paggi
Nicola Piovani
Luigi Lo Cascio, Elio Germano, Leonardo Maltese, Sara Serraiocco, Emma Bonino
01 Distribution (Italy)
Gallery
Poster
Trailer
Pressbook
Representation strategies, rhetorics and stereotypes
Narrative & characters
In a sense, precisely because the film is a historical drama centring around an important figure in the history of homophobic legislation in Italy, the protagonist – Aldo Braibanti, played by Luigi Lo Cascio – is perhaps not even the most interesting character in Lord of the Ants. Rather, it is the queer men who surround Braibanti, and especially his young companion Ettore Tagliaferri (Leonardo Maltese), his old friend Vanni (Luca Lazzareschi) and, implicitly, the Unità journalist Ennio (Elio Germano). Indeed, while Luigi Lo Cascio certainly brings weight and interest to the representation of Braibanti, this is mostly categorised by the actor’s persona as shaped by roles in engaged films depicting activists, intellectuals and historical figures – most notably Peppino Impastato (One Hundred Steps), but also his roles in The Best of Youth, Good Morning, Night, The Traitor, We Believed, An Italian Name, etc. Here, the homosexuality of Braibanti is not entirely convincing, pushed to the background to favour characterisations as the difficult intellectual and the victim.
Ettore is the emotional heart of Lord of the Ants. His queer characterisation is established not through flamboyance but through sincerity and vulnerability. In contrast to the harsh conservatism of his family – embodied especially by his brother, who seems to envy his brother’s relationship with Aldo, but for instrumental reasons – Ettore represents innocence and genuine affection. His relationship with Braibanti is marked less by seduction than by discovery: the film frames their bond as one of intellectual and emotional awakening. This makes his subsequent institutionalisation particularly cruel, underlining that what corrupts Ettore is not queerness but the repressive violence of family, society, and healthcare systems. His testimony in court, where he insists on the freedom of his affection, and his brief reunion with Braibanti, fragile yet tender, crystallise his role as the victim of intolerance rather than of love.
Vanni offers an entirely different queer presence. Effeminate, theatrical, and steeped in the decadent intellectual spheres of 1960s Rome, he seems to echo the queer urban subcultures associated with figures like Pasolini. Placed against the purity of Ettore, Vanni represents a flamboyant, unapologetic mode of queerness in the birthday party sequence. His mannerisms and camp sensibility might be dismissed as stereotype, yet they allow the film to explore a spectrum of queer identities. Unlike Ettore, Vanni is not shamed or silenced – at least within the safety of his home. He embodies a radical survival strategy, a kind of defiance in being unabashedly himself. His presence complicates the narrative by suggesting that queerness need not be confined to innocence or victimhood, but can also claim visibility and pleasure in a hostile world.Ennio, finally, occupies a more ambiguous space. His sexuality is never made explicit, but his empathy and his political engagement repeatedly align him with queer resistance. He challenges his editor in chief at L’Unità, Braibanti’s naive yet smug lawyer, and his cousin’s homophobic boyfriend, positioning himself as an ally, if not a participant. One striking sequence (to which I return below) hints at a personal stake, blurring the line between solidarity and identification. Ennio thereby broadens the film’s horizon: through him, Lord of the Ants critiques not only conservative repression but also the silences of the Italian left and the contradictions of international communism, particularly in relation to the USSR. In this way, his character suggests that queerness is a political question that implicates everyone. At the same time, not pushing to make the character even a little more explicitly queer could easily be seen as a shortcoming in the name of self-censorship. This is especially because, despite this array of characters, the film shies away from any explicit representations of queer people kissing or having sex: ultimately, it is difficult not to see this as an intention to make a less radical and more normative arthouse product, rather than a queer film.
Stereotypes & strategies of inclusion
Ants and Ambiguities
Amelio’s Lord of the Ants unfolds through a non-linear structure. It opens at a festa dell’Unità of the Italian Communist Party, with the 1957 Soviet film The Cranes are Flying playing in the background. Here, the journalist Ennio observes Braibanti and Ettore together in a moment of intimate conversation. The scene also introduces the recurring metaphor of ants: Braibanti was not only a poet and dramatist but also a myrmecologist, and after watching the couple, Ennio blows an ant from his hand. The imagery recurs a few sequences later in cutaways to ant farms, used to mask time jumps, and in dialogue references, but its precise significance remains somewhat elusive. At moments the ants suggest fragility, at others scientific objects subjected to observation or manipulation, much as Braibanti himself becomes during the trial. Yet the film never fixes the metaphor, leaving its meaning diffuse. Given its prominence, this lack of clarity risks weakening its power: rather than illuminating the injustice faced by Braibanti, the ants remain an evocative but underdeveloped motif.
Ettore’s Testimony
From this opening, the film moves to the crucial moment of Ettore Tagliaferri’s forced removal from the Roman apartment he shared with Braibanti in 1965, before his confinement in a psychiatric institution. A lengthy flashback reconstructs their relationship over the first hour of the film, but the trial dominates the second act. From the outset, the proceedings are shown as hopelessly biased: every word and gesture is twisted to confirm Braibanti’s guilt. The emotional climax arrives in Ettore’s testimony. Shot in an extended close-up with no cuts, his nervousness and trauma are made painfully visible – patchy hair and scars from electroshock treatments marking his body. Actor Leonardo Maltese delivers a finely graded performance: he stumbles at first, fearful and hesitant, then grows luminous when affirming the truth of his relationship with Aldo, insisting, against a guiding question, that “unnatural relationships do not exist”. Maltese then captures expertly the way Ettore’s happiness and confidence fade, as he senses how his words are distorted by the court, even to be used against the man he loves.
Overall, the sequence aligns him with the film’s younger, idealistic figures including Ennio and Graziella, and in contrast to the more stoic and skeptical Aldo. Here Ettore speaks truthfully of queer love, whereas Aldo, when pressed earlier to do the same by Ennio, remained sceptical, declining the journalist’s “lesson” with bitter irony. This tension – between the idealism of youth and the weary caution of lived experience – lies at the core of the film’s drama.
The Unspoken Queerness of Ennio
A more subtle exploration of queer identity comes in a later episode involving Ennio, around the appeal sentence for Braibanti’s trial (in 1969). Ordered to abandon the case, his editor accuses him of being too personally involved, remarking: “I was mistaken to give this assignment this to someone like you”. In response to this, Ennio disappears for a while, before Graziella, his activist cousin, finds him in a restaurant. Their exchange, shot in warm browns and yellows in contrast to the cool whites and greys of the newsroom, carries an intimate undertone. When Ennio asserts that the appeal “must go well… you know why?” she replies simply: “I know everything”. The dialogue avoids explicit definition, but it quietly opens a space for queer potential – less about outing or categorisation than about the suggestion of shared knowledge and mutual recognition. In this refusal to spell things out, Amelio gestures to the lived reality of queerness in 1960s Italy: identities unacknowledged in public discourse but present, powerful, and sustaining in private. If the film often leans towards didacticism, here its restraint is more effective, offering an understated glimpse of solidarity and hidden belonging.
Conversations
Cathy La Torre and Tommaso Zorzi interview director Gianni Amelio, and actors Luigi Lo Cascio and Elio Germano (01Distribution, September 9, 2022).
Manuela Santacatterina interviews actor Elio Germano and actress Sara Serraiocco to promote the film (HotCorn, September 6, 2022).
Conversations about the film with director Gianni Amelio and principal cast members Elio Germano, Luigi Lo Cascio, and Sara Serraiocco (01Distribution, September 6, 2022).
“Gianni Amelio, Director of Il signore delle formiche”. In CinEuropa.org, September 8, 2022. Interview by Camillo De Marco with director Gianni Amelio.
«I sketched four female figures that represent different aspects of feminine consciousness. There is a mother who believes that homosexuality is an illness and tries to “cure” her homosexual son. We cannot justify her, but we can understand her, place her within her time. Then we have a loving mother to the point of sacrificing herself — Braibanti’s mother. In the film I wasn’t able to tell the story of how, when Braibanti, a partisan during World War II, was captured by the Nazi-fascists, she personally went to plead for his release. Then there is a young woman who represents the modern woman, open to society’s changes, a woman who took part in ’68, who placed herself at the heart of a protest against that shameful trial. A small protest, because at the time people were ashamed to demonstrate in front of the courthouse for the trial of an “invert,” as it was said then. Finally, there is a 16-year-old girl, whom I find a moving, beautiful character, who may secretly be in love with Ettore, and who, when the boy has already gone to live with Braibanti and their relationship is no longer possible, still takes care of him. She goes to Ettore’s house to clean, precisely while he is locked away in a psychiatric clinic. She is a woman who loves beyond sex».
“Leonardo Maltese: ‘Acting Solves My Life’”. In Vanity Fair, September 23, 2022. Interview by Stefania Saltalamacchia with actor Leonardo Maltese.
«Ettore is simply a curious boy who needs to breathe, to leave behind the stifling environment of his small town. And Braibanti gives him literature, theater, art. He takes him to Rome, and Ettore even discovers that there’s a pyramid in Rome. He’s thrilled. In court he will say that he was in love with his intellect. Certainly, he and Aldo cared for each other, but there was nothing morbid about it. Ettore followed him not because he was madly in love, but because with him he could express himself».
“Gianni Amelio on Lord of the Ants and the Still Pervasive Presence of Homophobia in Italy”. In Variety, September 10, 2022. Interview by Nick Vivarelli with director Gianni Amelio.
«Nick Vivarelli: In the film there is a secondary character who, like you, is from the Southern region of Calabria, who says that a gay man has two choices: “You either cure yourself or kill yourself.” Is that phrase drawn from your personal experience?»
«Gianni Amelio: Yes, it’s the only line in the film that I’ve heard with my own ears. I was 16 and someone in a group, referring to me, said that phrase».
«NV: What do you consider the ideal audience for ‘Lord of the Ants’?»
«GA: An elementary school teacher in the Italian South who is afraid to come out and openly say he’s gay because he fears that the next day families will pull their kids from class. And also parents of kids who are gay and will have to deal with the day when their kids have the courage to come out to them».
Business strategies and communication rhetorics
Strategies
Lord of the Ants is produced by Simone Gattoni and Gaudy Rossi for Kavac Film and Beppe Caschetto for IBC Movie, in collaboration with Morino Zani and Malcom Pagani (Tenderstories) and Paolo del Brocco (Rai Cinema). In particular, Gattoni’s Kavac Film is a production company founded in 1997 by Marco Bellochio and Francesca Calvelli, that is dedicated to auteur and arthouse cinema, while IBC is the production arm closely associated to Caschetto’s important Bologna-based talent agency ITC2000. Tenderstories is a talent production and promotion company (for filmmaking but also visual art), with a global scope.
In terms of public funding, Lord of the Ants received support from the Emilia Romagna Film Commission (part of the film being shot around Piacenza) as well as the Lazio Region (other sequences are set in Rome). It also gained support from the Ministry of Culture, to the tune of €300.000 of competitive funding and another €2.7m provided as a tax credit to the three main production companies (source).
At the presentation of the film at the Venice Film Festival, in a press conference, Amelio speaks to its ideation: Bellocchio at Kavac had originally offered to the director the chance to direct a documentary on Braibanti, in view of his earlier documentary on LGBT folks in Italy (Felice chi è diverso, which was originally to include an interview with Braibanti, though he was unwell and passed in the year of the film’s release). Amelio counter-proposed a fictional film, to be written with young screenwriters Edoardo Petti and Federico Fava, and Kavac accepted.
While there is little direct information about the contribution made by Rai Cinema to its production, nor its motivation, in a press conference regarding the slate of the public service broadcaster in April 2021 indirectly presents Lord of the Ants within a broader production rhetoric. Entitled “A riveder le stelle” (to see the stars again), paraphrasing the end of Dante’s Inferno in reference to the shift out of the pandemic period, CEO of Rai Cinema Paolo Del Brocco says, after having outlined the economic mandate of the company,
“And then there is the cultural dimension. Especially at this moment, we are aware of the importance of offering a broad range of films that can contribute to telling the story of our country, to sharing the values that unite us, and to sustaining our cultural identity — which today, in a global world that has revealed all its vulnerabilities, including within the audiovisual sector, represents one of the main objectives, if not the most important challenge, for our cultural industry” (source). This gives us a sense of the way Lord of the Ants, a film which excavates an important history of homophobia in Italy, fits into this process of critical narratives of the country, part of the social impetus of the broadcaster.
Communication rhetorics
The main visual identity of the publicity for Lord of the Ants, i.e., the one-sheet and the various posters in line with its aesthetic, does not centralise the themes of homophobia, queer relationships or diversity in any particular way. Rather, it centralises the actors (Germano, in particular, with profiles of Maltese and Lo Cascio) and foregrounds the director’s identity. This is likewise true of the international publicity of the film (English and French-language). In other words, it is presented more as a historical biopic by an auteur and with established stars, rather than a LGBTQ+ themed film.
Conversations
Gianni Amelio and the primary cast of the film, together with producers Morino Zani, Paolo Del Brocco and Simone Gattoni, at the Venice Film Festival. For time reasons, the producers do not speak (RaiPlay, 2022).
“Amelio: ‘A Film That Gives Courage to Those Who Cannot Have It’”. In Cinecitta News, September 6, 2022. Article by Cristiana Paternò including Amelio’s account of the film’s creation.
«After Felice chi è diverso, I was considered a specialist on the subject. I had spoken with Aldo Braibanti many times, but at that time I wasn’t able to interview him because he was already unwell. I had found some documents about his interest in ants and little else, so I said no to Bellocchio’s proposal to make a documentary about him and instead put forward the idea of a fiction film, which I wanted to write together with two young unknowns, Edoardo Petti and Federico Fava».
“We Are the Stories”. In Prima Comunicazione, September 27, 2022. Interview by Marina Cappa with producer Moreno Zani (Tenderstories).
Moreno Zani: «When people were at home [during the pandemic], they needed content. Today content can be accessed on every possible device. I notice it with my children, who are 16 and 12: they don’t even glance at traditional TV, but instead they’re always on platforms, and they watch lots of films on their phones».
Marina Cappi: «So Tenderstories wants to tell them stories that capture their interest».
MZ: «Content – that’s our starting point».
MC: «But in your view, what kinds of stories is the audience looking for?».
MZ: «We’ve set ourselves an editorial line. Last year we produced Marx può aspettare by Marco Bellocchio, this year Bones and All, Amelio’s film… These are stories of life, of passion and deep love – something that touches the soul».
Circulation and audience responses
Circulation patterns
Lord of the Ants was premiered at the 79th Venice Film Festival on 6 September 2022, immediately providing the film with a lot of visibility. It was subsequently released in theatres just two days later, capitalising on this visibility. At the press conference at Venice, linked above, the film was explicitly presented in terms of its LGBTQ+ themes. In fact, the director (who came out publicly in 2014) also spoke openly at the event of his unhappiness following a love story that took place during filming. Amelio’s openness, together with the importance of the Braibanti story, was applauded in a moving way by the Franco Grillini, Honorary President of Arcigay and editor-in-chief of GayNews.it.
The film went on to have a significant presence in 71 global and national film festivals since its release including, most recently, a couple of homages to the director (at the Pesaro and Luca film festivals). Among these, there are a series of prestigious international festivals across the globe (Busan, Chennai, Chicago, Rio, Thessaloniki, Tbilisi), as well as many global Italian film festivals, again far reaching (Copenhagen, London, Minneapolis, Tokyo, Villerupt). What is striking, however, is the relative absence of queer-themed festivals from the lineup: it was presented in as a part of the LGBTQ+ section of the Taipei Golden Horse festival, but the other festivals were all general. This evidently speaks to the positioning of the film as a more general interest auteur-led biopic, but perhaps also signals a broader integration of LGBTQ+ themes, at least at this level of quality production.
In terms of its general theatrical release, it opened on 420 screens in Italy, taking over €430,000 in its opening weekend, before seeing an increase in the number of screens by the second week, to 470. Its theatrical run lasted around ten weeks. Despite its global festival presence, however, the film was not generally released in non-national markets. Box Office Mojo traces just two brief runs in Spain and New Zealand, both in summer 2023.
As regards post-theatrical, the film is currently available on streaming services including HBO max in a lot of central and Eastern Europe, while in Italy it is available via streaming on RaiPlay, and via TVoD on a series of other services (TIMVision, Apple TV, Amazon, Rakuten). The DVD and BluRay editions, produced by 01 Distribution, were released on 29 December 2022. It is also available in Australia, Brazil, Japan and Sweden, on local SVoD and TVoD services.
Festival (selected)
- Lucca Film Festival Omaggio a Gianni Amelio 2025
- Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema – Pesaro Film Festival Retrospettiva Gianni Amelio 2025
- Festival du Cinéma Italien de Bastia Competition 2024
- Festival de Cinema Italiano no Brasil Mostra Inéditos 2023
- Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival LGBTQ+ 2023
- Festival du Film Italien de Villerupt Hors Competition 2023
- Arena Nuovo Sacher Panorama 2023
- Eolie in Video – Un Mare di Cinema Panorama 2023
- Cinema Made in Italy Copenaghen Panorama 2023
- Italcine – Ciclo de Cine Italiano en Colombia Panorama 2023
- Italian Film Festival New Zealand Panorama 2023
- Transilvania International Film Festival Supernova 2023
- Festival del Cinema Italiano di Osaka Panorama 2023
- Festival del Cinema Italiano di Tokyo Panorama 2023
- 8 e 1/2 Festa Do Cinema Italiano Panorama 2023
- Minneapolis Italian Film Festival Panorama 2023
- Semana de Cine Italiano Contemporaneo Panorama 2023
- Festival Cinematografico Internacional de Uruguay Trayectorias 2023
- Festival de Malaga – Malaga Film Festival Mosaico Panorama Internacional 2023
- Italian Film Festival London – Cinema Made in Italy Panorama 2023
- Chennai International Film Festival World Cinema 2022
- Festival do Rio Mostra Panorama 2022
- Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de L’Habana Panorama Contemporaneo Internacional 2022
- Hainan Island International Film Festival Panorama 2022
- Tbilisi International Film Festival European Film Forum 2022
- International Thessaloniki Film Festival Special Screenings 2022
- MittelCinemaFest Panorama 2022
- SIFF’s Cinema Italian Style Panorama 2022
- Chicago International Film Festival Masters 2022
- Busan International Film Festival Icons 2022
- Fuoricinema Panorama 2022
- ST. Ali Italian Film Festival Special Events 2022
- Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia Concorso 2022
Reception
As mentioned above, the film had a relatively wide release in Italy, moving from 420 to 470 screens over the first two weeks. Its takings over the first two weekends were over €900,000, and in total, in Italy, the film made around €1.7m: though significantly less than its €7m production budget, at the time, emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic, this was taken as a promising sign of the re-emergence of Italian cinema. According to the Cinetel report for 2022, it was the 43rd best performing film of the year, and the 12th highest performing Italian film (overall the 5th best performance for 01 Distribution).
At the festivals and competitions where it participated, the film was widely acclaimed, obtaining 23 nominations (including for the film, the direction, and for actors Lo Cascio, Serraiocco or Maltese, at the Ciak d’oro, Nastri d’argento and David di Donatello). It took home a total of 18 prizes, including the Premio Guglielmo Biraghi at the Nastri d’argento and the Premio RB Casting Migliore Interpretazione Italiana, both for for Leonardo Maltese, the Premio Internazionale Migliore Sceneggiatura “Sergio Amidei” for best screenplay, awarded to Amelio, Petti and Fava, and the Grand Prix du Jury at the Festival du Cinéma Italien de Bastia.
This data is reflected in the broadly positive reviews of the film, too. In Italy, the critical press appreciated the film for its important and timely representation of the Braibanti case, seeing Lord of the Ants as an impressive affirmation of morally and politically engaged cinema. The cast was also very widely acclaimed, in particular Lo Cascio and Maltese, but also the women performers Sara Serraiocco and the opera singer turned actress Anna Caterina Antonacci, who plays Ettore’s mother. Some reviews also highlighted a few criticisms of the film, for its reliance on intellectualism, dense dialogue and a slow pace, as well as the ill-functioning of its symbolism. These themes are broadly represented also in the foreign press – though this is somewhat limited to reviews penned at the Venice Film Festival.
User reviews are mostly positive. On IMDb, the film has a rating of 6.7 (this raises to 6.9 and 7.0 for Italy-based and USA-based users, respectively) on Letterboxd it has 3.3 out of 5, while on MyMovies, the Italian site, the average is 3.6 – though user reviews raise this to 3.9. Many of the same positive and negative sides of the films are also reflected in user reviews: the political weight of the film and its important performances by the cast, as well as the film’s slow pace on the more negative side. One particularly common criticism among users on review aggregation sites is of the fleeting cameo of Emma Bonino (in a jarring and anachronistic close-up) in the film: intended to make parallels between Braibanti’s case and the historical difficulties of the Partito Radicale, this evidently did not translate to users. However, user reviews also recognise the LGBTQ+ themes of the film, much more explicitly than in the critical press (where the film remains more an arthouse, political success). This is seen in both positive and negative terms: on the one hand, users widely appreciate the role of Elio Germano as an implicitly queer, communist character; on the other, the film is criticised for almost entirely avoiding any explicit representations of gay sex.
Conversations
“Il signore delle formiche on the Podium: Screens on the Rise”. In Rai.it, 2022. The article includes a statement by Luigi Lonigro, director of 01 Distribution.
«After ranking second, on its opening weekend, only behind the blockbuster Minions 2, Gianni Amelio’s beautiful film has been in first place at the Italian box office since Monday. […] In a market that still struggles to take off, the box office revenues and attendance for Lord of the Ants show that the segment of viewers most driven away from cinemas by post-pandemic fears and health restrictions is finally returning. It is this very audience that is now generating extraordinary word of mouth, confirmed by the film’s steadily growing receipts».
Italian and foreign press
Italian Press
Paolo Nizza, “Il signore delle formiche, Review of Gianni Amelio’s Film Premiering on Sky,” Sky TG24, February 13, 2023.
«Lord of the Ants captivates because it has no interest in portraying yet another martyr. On the contrary, Barbanti (an excellent Luigi Lo Cascio) is a figure with a prickly personality, light years away from good manners and social conventions. And that is why showing him hopelessly in love with Ettore moves and touches the audience. Moreover, Leonardo Maltese, the newcomer playing Ettore, perhaps deserved the Marcello Mastroianni Award dedicated to emerging actors. Equally outstanding is the performance of Elio Germano, a journalist at L’Unità, who from the very first hours stands unequivocally by Braibanti’s side despite the whims and doubts of the director of the newspaper of the Italian Communist Party».
Emma Brocardo, “Strengths and Weaknesses of Gianni Amelio’s Il signore delle formiche”, Wired.it, September 7, 2022.
«The impression is that each of the characters is there to embody an abstract concept: the persecuted intellectual, the courageous journalist who risks his career to tell the truth, the boy victimized by his family and a bigoted, cruel religion, the young woman discovering her vocation for politics and social engagement».
Gabriele Niola, “Il signore delle formiche, The Review”, BadTaste.it, September 6, 2022.
«Lord of the Ants aims to be just that: so intense and profound that it is peppered with emphatic, theatrical acting, and dialogue in textbook Italian, making ordinary people say things like: “Ma che triste approdo la bestemmia” or “Abbiamo camminato tanto per arrivare dove?” in the middle of everyday conversations. A film […] that never manages to shout in fury, but prefers to appear elevated, outsourcing the certification of its own status to a very superficial intellectualism, seeking name-dropping (from Hemingway to Moravia to Levi), affected mannerisms, and artificial voices.
Nothing is missing from the list of elements of the “cinema du papa” of our years, including the most predictable parallel between the protagonist’s life and his profession – the study of ants. Metaphors so mechanical and predictable that they immediately make the film like a thousand others, preventing it from having its own true, personal meaning; pains told in such blatant ways that they undermine any empathy, like when Braibanti’s mother drags herself to the center of a square to collapse as if under an imaginary spotlight after reading an insulting message on the wall about her son».
Review of Lord of the Ants by Anna (user @Alannadi), via Letterboxd.com, September 6, 2022.
«Lord of the Ants doesn’t work. It’s the usual Rai Fiction quota (complete with drab cinematography) that the Venice Film Festival likes to respect, just to have one more Italian film in competition.
First of all, it’s yet another film in which the protagonist’s homosexuality – which here should be a fundamental element for the plot – is completely “sanitized”: there isn’t a kiss, no truly affectionate caress between Braibanti and the young student. […]
The same one-dimensionality afflicts Braibanti’s character, who remains cold, unperturbed until the end. He remains the portrait of an intellectual who expresses himself only through quotations and aphorisms and never lets us truly hear his voice».
Foreign Press
Jude Dry, “‘Lord of The Ants’ Review: Italy’s Homophobic Past, with Too Many Insect Metaphors”, IndieWire, September 10, 2022.
«And who could forget the ants? Written by Amelio with Edoardo Petti and Federico Fava, the script is desperate to squeeze meaning and metaphors from the tiny insects that are imprisoned in their terrariums – just like Aldo. The writers also try to eke romantic dialogue from the queen carrying sperm of many males until she buries herself in the ground to lay eggs.The three leading men give noble performances, and the impressive period costumes and sets give a nostalgic cast to the dour proceedings. Post-Berlusconi Italy has miles to go before dealing with its homophobic past and Lord of the Ants may mark an important historical reckoning. There are beautiful elements here, but it’s hard to take them all in».