02/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: Milad Tangshir, in his first fiction feature, was more than inspired by Bicycle Thieves for the odyssey of an African rider in Turin

Ibrahima Sambou in Anywhere Anytime

In Turin, Issa (Ibrahima Sambou), a young illegal immigrant from Senegal, is fired by his employer and seeks the help of his friend Mario (Moussa Dicko Diango), who advises him to become a rider. Mario lends him his phone with the app dedicated to riders and the money to buy a second-hand bicycle. Issa launches himself through the city streets and begins, with optimism, to deliver his first kebabs. So begins Anywhere Anytime [+see also:
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interview: Milad Tangshir
film profile] (the name of the delivery company, but also an existential condition) by Iranian filmmaker Milad Tangshir, his first fiction feature, the only Italian production selected at the 39th International Film Critics’ Week of the Venice Film Festival.

Tangshir shoots the most marginal Turin, with the support of director of photography Giuseppe Maio, who abandons the contrasting colours required of him on other films (Familia [+see also:
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Desperate, Issa spends the remaining 82 minutes of the film in a frenetic hunt for the thief. First at the market, then in the more “difficult” neighbourhood, and when he thinks he’s identified the thief, the friend of a homeless person (exactly like in Bicycle Thieves), he will have to deal with the knives of other immigrants (here the North African people are part of the “villains”). He will be tempted to steal in turn in order to go back to work, only to later regret it and also be guilty of betraying a friendship. It isn’t that the Teheran filmmaker wants to measure himself against the masterpiece of Italian neorealism, but rather he uses it as a platform to build his film about the invisibles. “Here, a black is a black,” Mario declares laconically at a certain point. With expected differences, Anywhere Anytime feels like a male version of Princess [+see also:
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interview: Roberto De Paolis
film profile] and it isn’t a coincidence that Roberto De Paolis is amongst the producers of this film. The choices for the soundtrack that accompanies Issa’s odyssey to survive are worth mentioning: Killing a Gypsie by Yom, Heywete by Tesfa-Maryam Kidane and other songs of the phenomenal jazz from Senegal and Ethiopia of the 1970s, to “create a sense of alienation”, as the filmmaker explained in the film’s notes.

Anywhere Anytime was produced by Vivo Film and Young Films with Rai Cinema. International sales are handled by Fandango.

(Translated from Italian)

Photogallery 01/09/2024: Venice 2024 - Anywhere Anytime

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Milad Tangshir
© 2024 Isabeau de Gennaro for Cineuropa @iisadege