Randaghi

Bluesky

The two teenage boys in Randaghi are made to literally quiver with energy by the animation from brothers Emanuele and Enrico Motti. Against a static background of scrappy Italian countryside, they throb with nilistic potential. There’s a trace of Beavis and Butthead in their attitude, mixed with the European working class sensibility of the likes of Andrea Arnold. Violence is also implied from the start, the colour red sharp against the skin of one kid, suggesting a punch up lies in his not-so-distant past.

There’s nothing nice about Nico (voiced by Carletto Giuliani) and Livio (Cristian Pertechino) – even their subtitles look as though they have been roughly carved into the fabric of the film with a knife. The Motti’s – whose film takes its name from the colloquial Italian word for “strays”, though in keeping with the cultivated scruffy nature of this short, it is rebelliously misspelled – capture the essence of juvenile boredom as the pair attempt to alleviate it after a chance encounter with one another.

Beyond the kids themselves, this is a stray environment, wild in ways that are far from romantic, the sound of buzzing flies as descriptive as anything we can see. There are other strays too, ones that also carry traces of red and which may have even more of a propensity for violence than the lads should they stray into one another’s paths. This entry in Locarno's Pardi Di Domani international competition, offers a savage anthem to doomed youth, while the stars twinkle on in the sky indifferently.

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