Chemical Hunger / The Munches
 

Directors: Paolo Vari, Antonio Bocola 
Screenplay: Antonio Bocola, Gianfilippo Pedote, Cristina Proserpio, Francesco Scarpelli, Paolo Vari
Photography: Mladen Matula
Music: Luca “Zulu” Persico 
Cast: Marco Foschi, Matteo Gianoli, Valeria Solarino, Teco Celio
Editing: Maurizio Grillo
Production: Gagarin Productions and Ubu Film 
International Distribution: Lucky Red, via Chinotto 16, 00195 Rome-Italy
tel. +39 06 37352296, fax +39 06 37352310, e-mail info@luckyred.it; e-mail produzionegagarin@libero.it
Year: 2004. Running Time 97’
 
The characters in this story could be living in the suburbs of any Italian metropolis. Commonly referred as “zarri”, they are young men in their early twenties who dropped school and now survive on precarious, badly paid jobs. They are the kind of guys who hang out downtown on Saturdays nights and whistle at women from bus windows. They worship their scooters and date girls who wear platform shoes. They spend their afternoons sitting on the benches of the neighborhood square, getting stoned and waiting for the weekend to come round: then full of ecstasy or cocaine, they go to the disco. In this story two of these guys are good friends and continue to meet in the square where they grew up as children with the other kids, the “zarri”. They live quite different lives nowadays, one makes his living as a pusher while the other has a regular job, very exhausting and not very well paid. However the two keep in contact and respect each other, up until the time when a pretty girl comes between them, and they both fall in love with her. With the backdrop of social tensions that build up in the square, the long-term friendship apparently falls apart.



        
        

                      

                  
         

                                

                               
 
                      
                         

      
Paolo Vari and Antonio Bocola
Since 1995, they have been working together as free-lance directors. They directed the previous medium-length films Fame chimica (1997), Liberi tutti (1998) and Pompeo (1999) broadcast by Mediaset Channels. They wrote and directed the docu-soap I Love Italy (8 episodes produced by Tele+ and RTSI) and many documentaries, including Lavori in corso, broadcast by Mediaset and Le mani sulla vita broadcast by Rai 2. In 2002 they have been working as authors and directors for the TV programme Le iene (Mediaset). Chemical Hunger (2004) is their first long feature film.