Youth

Paolo Sorrentino's Youth (Italian: La giovinezza) won Best Film at the 28th European Film Awards in December 2015, his second EFA Best Film after The Great Beauty two years earlier; back-to-back wins of that kind are unusual. It was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song (David Lang's Simple Song #3) at the 88th Academy Awards in February 2016.

It is Sorrentino's second English-language feature after This Must Be the Place (2011), and the one that completed his move into international production. Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel play the two old friends at its centre, with Rachel Weisz, Jane Fonda (in a small, commanding part that earned her a Golden Globe nomination), Paul Dano and the Italian veteran Roly Serrano in support. Caine has said in interviews that the role is among the most personally significant of his late career.

It was shot largely at the Hotel Schatzalp in Davos and the Waldhaus Hotel in Sils Maria, the same Sils Maria that gives Olivier Assayas' Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) its title and setting. Luca Bigazzi, who has shot nearly all of Sorrentino's features, was the cinematographer. David Lang, the American composer best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Little Match Girl Passion, wrote the score, and the soundtrack also draws long extracts from the classical repertoire, Stravinsky and Sibelius among them. Made on a budget of about €13 million, the film did good business across European territories.