cinematography
Kevin Brunet
editing
Jacopo Quadri

sound
Alberto Bellini
music
Cantautoma

cast
Maria Luisa Magno (Luisa)
Immacolata Capalbo (Imma)
Carmela Magno (Auntie #1)
Concetta Magno (Auntie #2)
Filomena Magno (Auntie #3)
Sergio Biagio Turano (Marshal)
Giorgio Pucci (Carabiniere)

co-productions
Faber Produzioni
Stemal Entertainment
with Rai Cinema
co-production
Elefant Films
with RSI
producers
Donatella Palermo
Alex Iordachescu

world sales
Mediawan Rights
documentaries@mediawan.com

international press office
Mediawan Rights
documentaries@mediawan.com

Italian press office
PUNTOeVIRGOLA
www.puntoevirgolamediafarm.com
info@studiopuntoevirgola.com

All families are unhappy in their own way, above all those who detest each other because they’re forced to live on top of each other in one building in a remote village in Calabria, a handful of streets clinging to one hill, known to all as Il Cozzo. And in every unhappy family, there always one who is more miserable than the others, and thinks only of how to do in their enemies. Like Luisa Magno, fifty years old and at war with the world since day one. Seemingly a rebel against traditional values, she is a woman juggling the odd jobs she gets, her love for her children and granddaughter, and her feuding with her mother, brother, and sister-in-law Imma, her bete noire. While the two women exchange insults and call in the cops, three elderly aunts, a tragicomic chorus, try in vain to keep the peace.

2025 Il quieto vivere
2025 GEN_ (doc)
2023 L’expérience Zola
2023 Les beaux parleurs (doc)
2022 Pinned into a Dress
(short, directed with Guillaume Thomas)
2022 Il posto (doc, directed with Mattia Colombo)
2022 Fashion Babylon (doc)
2021 Barbara Pravi, voilà qui je suis (doc)
2021 La dernière séance (doc)
2019 Fuori tutto (doc)
2015 Dé-cision (short, directed with Guillaume Lafond)
2014 Mon Baiser de Cinéma
(short, directed with Guillaume Lafond)

“I Want Her Dead is based on a true story from inside the four walls of my family home. In a Calabrian village that feeds on rancor and conflict is sacred, a domestic war rages between two sisters-in-law, Luisa and Imma. In a blend of the documentary form, fiction, and theater, I bring a closed, hyper-real universe to the screen, with every fight a star performance and every lunch a battlefield. Irony and cruelty aid me in exploring the prelude to the crime, that moment suspended in time when the real tragedy can still be averted, thanks to film, perhaps.” (Gianluca Matarrese)

Gianluca Matarrese moved to Paris in 2002 and completed his film and theater studies there. He graduated from the University of Turin and Paris 8, in the history and criticism of North-American cinema and screenwriting, then from the Ecole Internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris in 2005. Three years later, he broke into television as a writer and director of a comedy series for the OCS channels that would run until 2012. Matarrese continued his career as writer, reporter, artistic coordinator and segment producer for twenty television programs. His film Mon Baiser de Cinéma won the Achille Valdata Award for Best Short Film at the 2014 Torino Film Festival, while his first documentary feature, Fuori Tutto [Everything Must Go], was also honored at Torino in 2019, as Best Italian Documentary, and was selected for the 2020 Silver Ribbons. La dernière séance [The Last Chapter] (Queer Lion Award 2021) premiered at Venice in the International Critics’ Week. In 2023, Mattarrese presented L’expérience Zola at Giornate degli Autori. This year, before I Want Her Dead, he directed GEN_, selected for Sundance and co-written with Donatella Della Ratta.