Monte. 2016. Italy/France. Directed by Amir Naderi. In Italian; English subtitles. 105 min.
Amir Naderi’s journey as a filmmaker began in his native Iran, where his work played an important role in prerevolutionary cinema, and continued in New York City in the 1990s, where the city itself became the subject of an extraordinary topological/psychological exploration in his indie trilogy that began with Manhattan by Numbers (1993). Like his protagonists, Naderi is a filmmaker who thrives on impossible challenges, and, after making movies in Las Vegas and Tokyo, he established himself in Italy to create his latest gripping study in obsession, Monte. This is the story of Agostino (Andrea Sartoretti), a medieval sustenance farmer whose tiny plot of land, in the foothills of the Alps, lives in the eternal shadow of a neighboring mountain. If he is to feed his family, Agostino has only one course of action: to take on the mountain itself.