The Best of Youth

Marco Tullio Giordana's The Best of Youth (Italian: La meglio gioventù) was originally produced as a four-part RAI Fiction television series and broadcast on the network in 2003. It was reformatted as two feature-length theatrical films and shown in that version at Cannes 2003, where it won the Prix Un Certain Regard. The David di Donatello (the Italian national film prize) went to it for Best Film, Best Director and Best Producer at the 2004 ceremony.

The cast is led by Luigi Lo Cascio and Alessio Boni as the brothers, with Maya Sansa, Sonia Bergamasco, Adriana Asti, Andrea Tidona, Fabrizio Gifuni, Jasmine Trinca and Valentina Carnelutti in major supporting roles. Lo Cascio's screen career (he had broken through three years earlier in I cento passi, which Giordana had also directed) was consolidated by this performance, and Trinca was cast in many subsequent Italian and international productions on the strength of her work here.

The screenplay is by Stefano Rulli and Sandro Petraglia (the same long-running Italian writing partnership behind The Hundred Steps, Il Divo and the original Romanzo Criminale) and is widely considered the apex of their work. The six-hour theatrical version was released across two consecutive evenings in Italian cinemas (each part roughly three hours), an unusual exhibition pattern that became one of the most-discussed examples of Italian cinema's late-1990s/early-2000s convergence with prestige television production.