We Were Children

Directed and co-written by Marco Martani, WE WERE CHILDREN is a captivating combination of revenge thriller and coming-of-age tale of lost innocence. In a small town on the Calabrian coast, a peaceful thirty-year-old postman (Francesco Russo) is arrested for threatening a policeman with a knife. At the carabinieri station, he is interrogated and despite his initial silence, the policeman senses a deeper issue. During his interrogation, the postman reluctantly opens up, recounting a traumatic event from twenty years ago that involved a group of his childhood friends. Now in their thirties with life experience and emotional struggles, they live scattered across different parts of Italy. However, when one of them decides to return to their hometown the others follow, and they all reunite to confront their past and deal with the haunting events from their childhood. Loosely based on the theatre monologue ZERO by Massimiliano Bruno, who co-wrote the screenplay with Martani, this neo-noir drama about facing the past is imbued with taut tension and features a stellar ensemble cast.

Born in 1968 in Spoleto, Umbria, Marco Martani is a screenwriter, playwright, director and film critic. A graduate of the Sapienza University of Rome, he began his career as a film critic in the 1980s and is known for writing the screenplays for The Mafia Kills Only in Summer (2013) and God Willing (IFF15). We Were Children is his third feature.