Mondo (film)

Mondo is a 1995 French drama film written and directed by Tony Gatlif based upon the short story by Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio. The film debuted at the Unifrance French Film Festival in Japan 1995, and premiered in France April 17, 1996.

Background

The film's star, Ovidiu Balan, was 11 when the film was shot. He is a Romanian Gypsy who was taken under the director's wing with help of the French government Gatlif created the film as a work on the themes of the "restless and free" gypsy, in contrast to the notion of settlements proposed for Sinti and Roma populations in the EU. Unlike similar films about street children, such as Salaam Bombay or Pixote, this film was intended as a fairy tale of sorts of a mythical spirit who touches the lives of outcast people in a society filled with prejudice against the gypsies.

Synopsis

The movie follows an orphan boy surviving in Nice through the kindness of strangers and his own ingenuity. One day Mondo (Ovidiu Balan) appears on the streets of Nice. He has no family, no possessions, no schooling, but shares a brilliant smile and good spirit. Being more at home in the city's gardens, fields, and seashore, the bustle of the city seems to overwhelm him. He has good survival instincts, avoiding police and threatening adults in his search for a family.

Mondo film

A mondo film (from the Italian word for "world") is an exploitation documentary film, sometimes resembling a pseudo-documentary and usually depicting sensational topics, scenes, or situations. Common traits of mondo films include an emphasis on taboo subjects (such as death and sex), portrayals of "foreign" cultures (which have drawn accusations of ethnocentrism or racism), and staged sequences presented as genuine documentary footage. Over time, the films placed increasing emphasis on footage of the dead and dying (both real and fake). The term shockumentary is also used to describe the genre.

History

Although earlier films such as European Nights (1959) and World By Night 1 & 2 (1961) may be considered examples of the genre, the origins of the mondo documentary are generally traced to the 1962 Italian film Mondo Cane (A Dog's World—a mild Italian profanity) by Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi which was a commercial success.

Documentary films imitating Mondo Cane in the 1960s often included the term "mondo" in their titles, even if they were in English; examples include Mondo Bizarro, Mondo Daytona, Mondo Mod, Mondo Infame and Mondo Hollywood. Films outside the genre followed suit: Mondo Trasho, Mondo Weirdo: A Trip to Paranoia Paradise, Mondo Keyhole and Mondo Brutale (a German release of Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left) title themselves mondo, although none are mondo documentaries. Later in the decade, this naming convention began to fall out of favour and fewer mondo films identified themselves as such in their titles.

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At Café Mondo, the blue light in the bathroom places me psychically somewhere in between a Wong Kar-Wai film and a student club night called like, “Petrol Wednesdays at Splash,” while at Rasputin’s ...
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