Alexei travels with a friend to Poland. They go on a coach to watch a football match and can only stay in the European Union for a few days. But their intention is to stay, because nothing is holding them back in their native Belarus anymore. They escape to France and, while fleeing, their friend dies. Alexei is left alone and joins the Foreign Legion. The French government does not ask him for anything, it does not want to know where he comes from or what his situation is. If he lasts five years, he will have papers, he will be a French citizen and his name will simply be Alex.
This is how Disco Boy begins, the first fiction feature film by Italian Giacomo Abbruzzese, which hits Spanish screens today. The Foreign Legion seems like the promised land, but it is not. Alexei is forced to participate in a dangerous mission in Niger. He must rescue a group of French people held by Jomo, who leads a terrorist group whose sole purpose is to preserve the ecosystem of their country threatened by the oil industry.
Alexei and Jomo do not know each other, but they are forced to face each other in a fight to the death. “I wanted to tell the war in a new way. He wanted to tell the two sides of the war. Because the usual thing is to focus on one of the sides. The interesting thing about Disco is that it shows both perspectives, that of the Belarusian immigrant and that of the Nigerian who fights for his homeland,” explains Abbruzzese in an interview with La Vanguardia.
The director, who defines his film as “atypical and with a mystical dimension,” has tried to show the “absurd and terrible situation that a man is forced to kill another man about whom he knows nothing.” And he has also incorporated a corporal element through dance, “which combines the fighting part with the musical part through choreography.”
Abbruzzese, who won a prize at the last Berlinale for this debut film, knows that he has been very “lucky”, because Franz Rogowski, the fashionable European actor, agreed to play Alexei, the protagonist of Disco Boy, although “it is true "That when he said yes to me, he still wasn't as well known as he is now."
After the success in Berlin and the international premiere of Disco Boy, the Italian director is now working on another script again in France, where he already resides, because "in Italy it is impossible to find financing for this type of cinema."
