Anime Nere is the story of three brothers – the sons of shepherds with ties to the ‘ndrangheta – and their divided souls. Luigi, the youngest, is an international drug dealer. Rocco, Milanese by adoption, is to all appearances a middle-class businessman, thanks to his cousin’s ill-gotten gains. Luciano, the eldest, harbours a pathological fantasy of pre-industrial Calabria and engages in lonely, melancholy dialogue with the dead. His twenty-year-old son Leo belongs to the lost generation, who have no identity. The only thing Leo has inherited from his ancestors is resentment and for him, the future is a train that has already left the station. After a trivial argument, he carries out an act of intimidation against a bar protected by a rival clan. Anywhere else, it would have been dismissed as nothing more than youthful foolishness. But not in Calabria, and especially not in Aspromonte. Instead, it is the spark that lights the fire. For Luciano, it is a return to the drama many years after the murder of his father. In a dimension suspended between the distant past and modern life, the characters are driven towards the archetypes of tragedy.
