CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT

17 years-old Giulio is sent by his mother to a boarding school for difficult offspring of rich families. The institution is sort of a “golden prison”, isolated in the Alps, to which inadequate parents delegate the task of educating the ruling class of the future. In this cold and ghastly place the boys are cut off from everything. Even the use of cell phones and the internet is limited to a few minutes per day. Adhering to the strict rules of the boarding school is hard, but Giulio finds a good friend in Edoardo, who is maybe a little crazy, but who seems the smartest of all. They find out that security becomes more relaxed at night and they start running away to a nightclub in the middle of the woods. There they meet Elena, a young prostitute whose destiny will be unforgettably linked to theirs. The night is a space of freedom, of new and perturbing experiences for Giulio and Edoardo. But what they don’t know is that their transgressions are part of the educational program of the school. Andrea De Sica, the grandson of legenday director Vittorio De Sica, has already directed quite a few documentaries and short films. Add to that that he has also worked as an assistant-director for the likes of Bernardo Bertolucci and Ferzan Ozpetek, and you can hardly say that he started filming his feature debut from nothing. Children of the Night is at the same time a methaphore about growing up, a social comment and a gruesome fairytale. This Italian-Belgian co-production also stars Belgian’s own Fabrizio Rongione (The Kid With The Bike, Two Days, One Night) in a very ambiguous part.