A travelling circus, four performers whose gifts are anything but stage tricks, and a capital city sliding under German occupation: Freaks Out is a war film that happens to have superpowers in it, or a superhero film that happens to be about 1943.
What is Freaks Out about?
Gabriele Mainetti's second feature is set in Rome in the months after Italy's surrender to the Allies, when the Germans have moved in and the city has become a trap. Matilde, Cencio, Fulvio and Mario are the star attractions of the small Circo Mezza Piotta, run by an ageing showman named Israel who has been both employer and father figure to them. Their acts draw crowds because the abilities on display are real, and in a Europe organised around ideas of purity and deviance, being genuinely different is a dangerous thing to be. When Israel vanishes and the circus loses its anchor, the four are left to decide whether to stay together, hide, or try to leave the country. At the same time, someone else in the occupied city is looking for people exactly like them, and this searcher believes their gifts could alter the outcome of the war itself.
About the cast
Claudio Santamaria leads a cast that includes Aurora Giovinazzo, Pietro Castellitto, Giancarlo Martini, Giorgio Tirabassi, Max Mazzotta, Franz Rogowski and Eric Godon, a mostly Italian ensemble whose mix of veteran character actors and younger performers gives the troupe a lived-in, mismatched quality.
Context & significance
Freaks Out was released in 2021 as an Italian and Belgian co-production, and its listed genres, adventure, drama, fantasy and war, are all pulled in equal measure. Mainetti had previously become known for bringing a superhero sensibility to Italian settings, and here he expands that idea to period scale, with occupied Rome, partisan resistance and the machinery of the Nazi regime forming the backdrop for a story about outsiders. For K-Time viewers drawn to Second World War stories, it offers an unusual angle: less about generals and front lines, more about the people a fascist state wanted to erase.
Watching Freaks Out on Ktime
Freaks Out is on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so it can be enjoyed in Farsi or in the original Italian with subtitles. Log in with your K-Time account to press play; the film's page is free to read, and everything from the menus to the subtitle settings is built for a Farsi-speaking audience.