by Fabrizio Sinisi
with Alessandro Bay Rossi, Dario Caccuri, Andrea Sorrentino and Zoe Zolferino
directed by Mario Scandale
video byLeo Merati
assistant director Marialice Tagliavini
production by La Corte Ospitale, Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica Silvio d’Amico
One January evening, young Sabine arrives from the Austrian countryside in a cold and snowy Berlin to start university. She meets a boy, Marinus, who offers her accommodation and friendship. As soon as she arrives at the Faculty of Arts, Sabine also befriends two subversive students: Helmut and Ralf. It could be a story like many others. But it isn't: the day she arrives in Berlin is January 30, 1933—the elderly President Hindenburg has just appointed Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Party, as chancellor. Helmut and Ralf are not just two aesthetes: they are also prominent members of the Hitler Youth. Her friend Marinus is actually Marinus Van der Lubbe, a young communist believed to be the alleged perpetrator of the Reichstag fire. Sabine thus finds herself living and growing up in a Berlin that is a theater of unrest, ghosts, and desires, at the crossroads between the unbridled freedom of the Weimar Republic and the grim tragedy of the Nazi hell.
Berlin during Hitler's rise to power, where everyone is forced to take sides: what will Sabine choose? Incendi is a sentimental education in reverse, a coming-of-age novel about lost and cruel youth. An investigation into the seduction of violence that runs through every society, including our own. The story of four young people, four different expressions of the existential void that drives human beings to cling tenaciously to ideals and identify an enemy. But what are the right ideals? And who will ultimately be the scapegoat, the true sacrificial victim of this era?
