Ciak action… the movie about golf is shot! The teaser of Time is still ours, a feature film conceived, written and directed by Maurizio Matteo Merli, will be presented on Wednesday at the Venice Film Festival. “We finally have the chance to show Italians what golf really is.
We can make people understand what lies behind and inside our world, “Ascanio Pacelli, leading actor in the film, tells Golfando.
Venice Film Festival 2022, golf
Next to him there will be Mirko Frezza, Antonello Fassari, Miguel Gobbo Diaz, Viktoire Ignoto and Simone Sabani.
All professional actors and already established on small and / or big screen. All but one, namely Ascanio Pacelli who by profession is the general manager of the Terre dei Consoli club in Viterbo. “Maurizio is a golf and cinema enthusiast.
His father was a well-known face of the Italian detective stories of the seventies. He was playing with me and one day he showed up, revealing that he wanted to make a movie about golf and that he wanted me as a leading actor.
I thought he was joking. Then I realized it wasn’t like that ” Pacelli’s is not a relationship of roses and flowers with the limelight. It is he himself who reveals it: “I have two theater performances and a fiction behind me.
Yet, every time I introduce myself, I feel I am seen as the “former Big Brother” and I feel the importance of the surname I bear ” For Merli it was not like that, Merli went straight and hired Ascanio. “I know what you can do, I know where to work on you and I know that you are the right person for my film”.
This is the filmmaker’s answer to the golfer’s perplexities. “Time is still ours” starts in 1989 and tells about two kids, Stefano (Mirko Frezza) and Tancredi (played by Tancredi Pacelli, Ascanio’s second son).
They are friends for the skin, coming from opposite classes and united by a passion for golf. After more than thirty years of oblivion, the two find themselves as grown men. Stefano amidst abstinence crisis and recovery community, Tancredi (now Ascanio) increasingly rampant between cryptocurrencies and speculation but with the strong risk of losing his daughter forever.
To bring them closer together the desire to draw a line on the past the first, on the present the second. Tancredi takes back the bag, finds his mentor Costantino (Stefano’s father, played by Antonello Fassari) and aims to return to the top.
He tries to restart from the Qualifying School, the qualifying races to play on the European Tour (now DP World Tour). Tancredi will face opponents of the past (Paco above all, that is Miguel Gobbo Diaz) but also many young Bryson DeChambeau, all muscles and long play.
And there will be challenges that go far beyond a golf movie. For a golfing movement like the Italian one, “Time is still ours” represents a huge promotional showcase. The release of the film is scheduled for early September 2023, ie on the eve of the Ryder Cup in Rome.
It goes without saying that this is not a randomly chosen date. “Ryder Cup means commercial opportunities and promotion of their brands. It means investors who, through golf and media attention, will be able to do business – says Maurizio Matteo Merli -.
Here the idea of accompanying the event by enriching it with audiovisual content. It will be the first film on golf in Italy: we have generated the interest of Federgolf and Coni ” The Father and Son house produces “Time is still ours” with the contribution of the leading Italian sport and golf institutions.
“The sponsors are called Federgolf, Coni and PGA Italiana – explains Ascanio -. But the list doesn’t end there. There are other brands and technical sponsors ready to show their faces as soon as the new government passes the tax credit ”.
The movie about golf: the times The baptism of the film is in Venice on Wednesday with the entire cast. The set will be set up in March between the greens of the Terre dei Consoli and those of the National Golf of Sutri. The film will go to various streaming platforms to enter homes directly once it comes out of cinemas.
“In the film – continues Ascanio – there is an intersection of human values and relationships well known to those who know golf but completely unknown to the mass of spectators. In Italy we have to make this sport known.
As a golfer, I am convinced that we will be able to talk about golf even for those who have never set foot in a club and have always had an outdated vision of it”
