The Hand of God

Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God (Italian: È stata la mano di Dio) won the Grand Jury Prize and the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor (Filippo Scotti) at the 78th Venice International Film Festival in 2021. It was selected as Italy's official submission for the 94th Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category and earned a nomination at the ceremony in March 2022; this was Sorrentino's third Oscar engagement after The Great Beauty's win in 2014 and Youth's nominations in 2016.

The film is the most directly autobiographical work in Sorrentino's filmography. The director has been candid in interviews and in the film's promotional cycle that the central plot points (including the family dynamics and the trauma at the centre of the story) are taken from his own teenage years in 1980s Naples. The film was Sorrentino's first feature shot in his home city since The Consequences of Love twenty years earlier; cinematography is by Daria D'Antonio (her first feature collaboration with Sorrentino, succeeding the long-running Luca Bigazzi partnership).

The cast pairs newcomer Filippo Scotti with Toni Servillo (in his ninth feature collaboration with Sorrentino) and Teresa Saponangelo, with Marlon Joubert, Luisa Ranieri and Renato Carpentieri in support. The film was acquired by Netflix for international distribution and became the streamer's first Italian original to receive Academy Awards consideration. The Maradona footage (including archival material from the 1986 Mexico World Cup that gives the film its title) was licensed from FIFA and the Argentine Football Association after extended negotiations.