The Tale of King Crab
Playfully riffing on folkloric fable tropes, THE TALE OF KING CRAB stars Gabrielle Silli as Luciano, a boozy vagabond in 19th-century Italy whose forbidden love for a beautiful local girl (Maria Alexandra Lunga) leads him into conflict, tragedy and exile. Luciano later poses as a priest in Patagonia, where his fanciful theory about magically gifted crabs leading the way to buried treasure creates more havoc. Backed by an impressive non-professional cast, writer-director duo Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis craft an enchanting and visually arresting blend of fairy tale and Homeric odyssey that recalls Werner Herzog in his prime.
Gabriele Silli, Maria Alexandra Lungu, Ercole Colnago
- Notes From OscilloscopeMatteo Zoppis and Alessio Rigo de Righi’s THE TALE OF KING CRAB is a film that defies temporality. We know it was made in 2021, but if 100 years from now an unmarked copy is pulled from a time capsule, those aliens won’t know if it was from 1963, 1973, 1983, 19…you get the point. What they will know is that it’s beautiful to look at and it’s accessible to them, in spite of the cultural differences (they’re aliens, after all!), because at its heart it is a treatise on storytelling, one of the oldest and truest creative mediums humankind (and I assume alienkind) has ever known.