More than ten minutes of applause during the public screening for the first Italian movie Anime Nere, presented in competition at the 71th edition of the Venice Film Festival.

The film by the Italian movie Director Francesco Munzi presents the harsh reality of the ndrangheta, the mafia present in the Italian region Calabria, in the impenetrable mountain area of Aspromonte.

The movies tells the story of a family with three brothers living in a different way the fact of being part of a criminal family. Old hard feeling and personal character differences, among the three "souls" of the family, will provoke an auto-destruction of the clan.

Francesco Munzi explains to Xinhua in an interview the ambition of the movie, he said "The movie apparently show a war between clans but in the reality this is a story which deals with human aspects and about the internal war breaking out in this family, then we see some contradictions and the weakness and squalor of crime."

Munzi presented his first movie Saimir (2004) in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival and his second movie Il resto della notte (2008) in the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs section of the Cannes Film Festival.

Asked about which elements you have to insert to produce something new in a mafia movie, the Italian director explains:" I was very much afraid because I had to confront myself with important masterpieces like, for example, The Godfather. I felt, both in the novel which inspired this movie and the location in the Italian Region Calabria, a true unique element. "

The Italian filmmaker then clarifies that he described mountain area called Calabrian Aspomonte, which is a place he didn't know and which have the peculiarity of hosting a population living between archaic tradition and modern times. "The contradiction between these two worlds seemed to me a unique element. In Calabria I was moving, together with the writer of the novel, in an existent place where the criminal episodes happened for real so in my research I could avoid to build stereotypes about mafia". He said.

Another challenge was the fact of working in a potentially hostile area but Munzi explains that he had an artistic approach and I didn't want to do an "investigation" or asking for names or the criminal record of anyone ."The population was involved in the staging, it was something fictional, a sort of self-representation so I didn't had any type of pressure or frighten." He added.

Munzi wanted to explicates the deep meaning of the title Black Souls, he said, "I didn't invented it but I felt comfortable with it, there are different meanings. The "black" soul it's something you can't see and this is a peculiarity of the mafia's clan in Calabria. We imagine sometimes the criminals as someone dressed in specific way which exhibit his power, now the criminals in Calabria have can blend in with a bourgeois appearance. They have a "black" soul but we see only the "clean" face."

He continues, "Another meaning is that there is a black soul as a destiny because many families in Calabria are carrying a negative past that they can't get rid of. My objective was to explore the human nature going more to the archetype, I started from the reality and facts but then I got rid of these elements to get closer to the tragedy and to a universal stage". He concluded.

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