Tortorici in competition at Locarno with two sixteen-year-olds in 2012 Palermo

Italian director Giovanni Tortorici is presenting «Ketticè» at the Locarno Film Festival, in competition for the Golden Leopard. The film follows the friendship between two sixteen-year-olds, Giulio and Ketty, inside family and social dynamics that press in on them from every side.

Born in 1996, Tortorici drew on his own adolescent memories of Palermo to build the story of Giulio, played by Salvatore Gallina, and Ketty, played by Rachele Testagrossa. The action is set in 2012. Compared with his 2024 debut «Diciannove», the story is less autobiographical: the sixteen years spent in the city and the dynamics among young people in Palermo remain an important basis, the director explains, but narrative construction has been layered over the real material.

The core of the film is the power relationship between adults and adolescents. Parents and teachers watch, educate and punish, and Tortorici reads that set of gestures as deeply repressive. Beneath the veil of paternalism, meaning the wish to guide the young properly, he sees many oppressive and abusive patterns. Giulio’s mother, played by Monica Bellucci, is psychologically unstable and has an inappropriate relationship with her son.

Relations among peers are marked by violence too, and by social conventions that reproduce the oppression of adults. The girls are often competitive and aggressive with each other. The friendship between Ketty and Giulio offers a space of lightness and allows them to escape that pressure for a moment. Among the ways the two defend themselves is light drug use.

Two schools, two languages

The social divide runs through school and through language. Giulio comes from a well-off family and attends a private school. Ketty belongs to a lower class and goes to a state school with a poor reputation. Tortorici reconstructed the speech of Palermo in 2012, alternating regional Italian with dialect, and made that alternation the marker of the distance between the two worlds.

The film is produced by Luca Guadagnino. It opens and closes with a song in Arabic, a reference to Sicily’s cultural layers and to the Arab influence that remains in the island’s language and culture. As for control over adolescents, the question the film raises stays open: where protection ends and where imposition begins.