Cannibal Dance

Rita and Bruno, a married couple, own a small tannery where a hired worker dies as a result of a faulty acid vat. They don't even know his name, so they decide to simply get rid of the body. The husband will take him, naked, to the park, and then everything will be as if nothing happened. Parallel to the events in the tannery, we follow the work day of city wardens Luciano and Maurizio, the self-declared “peace-and-order volunteers”, who are actually obsessed with the extreme views of intolerance, xenophobia, racism and fascism. When they hear on the scanner that there’s a naked man in the park, either a madman or a junkie, they act immediately. Both stories are thus linked and can now go deeper, the writing allowing for horror, but also for plenty of dark humour.

In Cannibal Dance, the young Italian author Tommaso Santi uncompromisingly paints the mentality characteristic not only for northern Italy, but for Europe in general. In addition to heartlessness of the small business people, forced into inhumane treatment of workers by market requirements, and the conceit and arbitrariness of the wardens, he subtly writes the problem of escaping into illusions perpetrated by hours spent in front of television screens.