SmoKings, Michele Fornasero, 92′, Italia, Svizzera, 2014
SmoKing is like a gangster movie: there are no good guys, just small bad guys fighting big bad guys. Who’s going to win this unfair battle? David or Goliath?
Cinema Primavera, saturday 30th april 21.30
smoKings – Trailer [ita] from INDYCA on Vimeo.
Title smoKings
Duration 96′
Year 2014
Country Italia
Genre Documentario
Language Italiano
Director Michele Fornasero
DOP Paolo Ferrari
Sound Gigi Miniotti
Editing Jesper Osmund, Marco Rezoli
Music Giorgio Giampà
Production Indyca, Ventura Film, Mjade Filmproduktions
Distribution Indyca, I Wonder Pictures
Festival Visions du Reel, Festival dei Popoli, Bellaria Film Festival
Awards 2014, C-Side Productions Post-production Prize for Best Swiss Film at Visions du Réel International Film Festival (Nyon, Switzerland); 2014, Prize Cinemaitaliano.info at Festival dei Popoli; 2014, Professional audience award as best italian documentary at DOC.it; 2015, best italian documentary at 33rd Bellaria Film Festival
Web Site http://www.smokings-ilfilm.it/
Synopsis
The Messina brothers are Yesmoke, a little tobacco company based in modern day Turin, Italy. Originally, Yesmoke was an online store for cigarettes selling its products all over the world. Every day millions of people would buy cheap packets of Marlboro, Camels and Lucky Strikes online. When sales reached over one hundred million, “Big Tobacco” started to fight the “Little Guys” and sued them for 550 Million dollars, obligating them to shut their website down. The two brothers decided to build their own cigarette manufacturing company in the outskirts of Turin, taking the fight to Philip Morris in an effort to level the playing field. Their goal is to take revenge and to attack tobacco multinationals by every means at their disposal. But today, the Italian government too and their severe regulations has changed the course of this on-going debate. So the two brothers are even more dedicated to try and fight against the system. smoKings is like a gangster movie, in that there are not good guys here, just small bad guys fighting big bad guys. Who’s going to win this unfair battle?
Director’s Statement
Two brothers try to get in before big tobacco’s miltinationals, this is the documentary film’s scenario. Actually I wanted to describe the life of two brothers, their way to think and to face in front of the rules. I chose their story, because it seemed to me exemplary about a certain way to do business today. A business often uncaring of consequences and honesty, a common trait in several branches, not only in the tobacco’s one. This way of acting has been the cause of bank crisis. In this world they work for oppotunity and not in name of legality. On the other hand the Messina brothers are in antithesis to this consolideted system. The two brothers could represent a capitalism’s purist polarizing, that is wanting to do more business than profit. Their strenght is adventure, running and running and never stopping, the profit isn’t seen as a goal, but as a judgment meter in a much more important challange: make something big, leave a sign in the history, being remembered. If it means to sell sigarettes, they sell sigarettes, they don’t have a specific vocation to a business, rather than another. The rules can be ignorated or rewritten and the playing field can change if necessary. The match they have chosen to play is played on a very ambiguous field, the tobacco’s one. A world made by nepotism, corruption, tax evasion, lack of controls on quality and ingredients, and ofter governaments and multinationals are in perfect harmony. The same war against tobacco, praised by governments and commissions all over the world, is more on media than legislative. After all the governments hardly can do without the huge fiscal incomes, that this branch guarantee them. The Messina brothers try in any way to denounce and scatter the tobacco multinationals’ lobby system. Actually they are doing in parallel their own lobby way, that follows different parameters and paradigms, maybe, but it will produce the same effects. We can evaluate both. I don’t think there is a better or a worst one, but rather there’s an old and a new one, a small and a big one, an emerging and a successful one. In this film there aren’t charachters can be defined positive or negative tout-court, they’re charachters acting in a convenience system. Facing this sequence of events my goal was to go beyond the story to pay questions on the current business world, its lack of scruple, its being ready to do anything to excel and annihilate the competition. No metter if it’s a multinational or a small factory in Settimo Torinese.
Michele Fornasero
Director’s bio-filmography
Michele Fornasero was born in Turin in 1980. He graduated in Business and Economy from the University of Turin. With a passionate experience as producer, editor and director with Indyca, he has worked on several shorts and documentaries.
Filmography director
2005 FRONTLINE IS EVERYWHERE; short fiction; director, writer, producer
2006 LA NOTTE BIANCA; short fiction; director, writer, producer
SMOKINGS is his first documentary as a director and also his first feature length film.
Filmography of other projects
2008 A SCRAP OF PARADISE; director: Gabriele Vacis; documentary; DoP and editor 2008 THE LEGEND OF THE BLUE FISH; director: Simone Catania; short mockumentary;
writer and editor
2010 LA PAURA SICURA; director: Gabriele Vacis; documentary; DoP and editor