
The Bandit of Port Avon
Summary
Moonlit contraband pulses through the Ligurian alleys of 1914 Port Avon, a fishing village painted in chiaroscuro where Giuseppe De Witten’s nameless smuggler—part Rimbaud, part Saint-Just—glides across the wharfs like a black-market Mercury, pockets swollen with anarchist pamphlets and uncut emeralds. Roberto Roberti’s customs officer, a repressed Dante who tallies sins instead of crates, stalks him through fog thick as wet wool, while Giulio Donadio’s one-armed war veteran circles both men like a damaged gull, hungry for redemption and brandy. Claudia Zambuto’s apothecary-poet grinds chalky powders that could pass for cocaine or communion wafers, trading kisses for intelligence; Bice Valerian’s countess-in-exile drifts through crumbling palazzos trailing ostrich feathers and the scent of gun-oil, bargaining her jewels for passage to Caracas. Oreste Visalli’s lighthouse keeper, eyes calcified by salt, projects forbidden lantern-slide images onto the clouds, turning night itself into a secret cinema. The plot coils around a single moonless shipment: twenty crates of rifles meant for North African rebels, buried inside marble saints. Betrayals ricochet faster than flintlock sparks; identities dissolve in harbour water; a final pistol shot inside the bell tower reverberates so loudly that every gull in the province takes flight at once, blotting out the dawn.
Synopsis
Director
Giuseppe De Witten, Roberto Roberti, Giulio Donadio, Claudia Zambuto, Bice Valerian, Oreste Visalli












