El árbitro
2009 · 16m · Italia
Directed by Paolo Zucca
Genres: drama, experimental, satire
On a lost football pitch of another time in archaic Sardinia, brutal fans and a despotic referee turn football into a choreography of struggle for power and life, in stark black and white.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to talk about the brutality and the power struggle, but what actually kills here is how Zucca treats football as pure ritual—stripping away the sport entirely and leaving only the ceremony of domination, which is so much weirder than just 'dark satire.'
Zucca positions this squarely in a lineage of European formalist cinema—Bresson's austerity meets Pasolini's mythic reclamation—and the black-and-white grammar, the deliberate pacing, the way bodies move as geometric language rather than naturalistic performance, all signal a director working with exacting formal awareness.
The choice to shoot in black and white on a desolate pitch with minimal dialogue forces every movement—a referee's gesture, the texture of dust, the spacing between bodies—to carry narrative weight that a conventionally lit, dialogue-driven version would dissolve; it's the constraint that makes the vision legible.