PUGNI IN FACCIA

“Dark Corner” is a long-term cinematic experiment that lasted over twenty years. The director started filming the young protagonist, when he was his elementary school teacher and Mirco was a difficult six-year-old child growing up amid violence in the outskirts of Rome.

For years after that, the director’s camera follows Mirco as he becomes a man, desperately struggling to become a boxing champion. Their relationship intertwines in the narration of Mirco’s personal and sporting adventures transforming the director into an invisible character of the story, who tries to help Mirco to overcome his violent and difficult background.

Mirco’s dysfunctional family, his coaches, his beautiful girlfriend Rubina and his friends from the slums, all invest him with their expectations. But it’s Mirco’s body, more scarred after each fight, that pays the price of all these expectations.

Over the years, despite street fights, drunken nights and gunshot wounds, Mirco becomes Italian Light heavyweight Champion in Rome and World Boxing Association Intercontinental Champion in Berlin. But it is not easy to escape a marked destiny.

Arrested in 2016 with the infamous accusation of kidnapping a child, Mirco finds himself in a prison cell and is eventually found not guilty of this crime only two years later, in 2018.

Author, photographer and director, Fabio Caramaschi graduated in Filosofia del Linguaggio (Philosophy of Language) at the University “La Sapienza” in Rome. He is a cinema and reportage photographer and realized many exhibitions and monographic publications. After the initial anthropologic and ethnologic videos produced by the Museo Nazionale delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari, he now works in the direction of television reports and inquiries broadcasted by Italian and international channels such as Rai Uno, Rai Due, Rai Tre, Rai Educational, La7, BBC World, CNN.

The documentary-films that he directed as author, director and photography director won numerous prizes: Pegaso d’Oro at Premio Ennio Flaiano 2001, Italia Doc prize at Libero Bizzarri 2002, the Jury Prize and the Audience Prize at the Roma Doc Fest 2002, the Audience Prize and a Special Mention at the Maremma Doc Festival 2002, the Cinemavvenire prize for the Best film at the Genova Film Festival 2005, Kodak prize for the Best Cinematography at Libero Bizzarri 2005, the Best Screenplay prize at the Hai visto mai festival in 2007, the Best Plot prize at Libero Bizzarri 2010, the Best Documentary prize at the Arcipelago festival 2011.