This could be the Television event of the year for fans intelligently conceived miniseries.
Director Luca Guadagnino was bound to premiere his new HBO series, “We Are Who We Are,” a set of coming of age stories in Italy, at Cannes as part of the 2020 Director’s Fortnight section. Paolo Moretti, who heads Directors’ Fortnight, had mentioned that he had been plotting a continuous screening of the eight-hour movie, with a lunch break in the middle.
”This is one of our big regrets as it would have been quite something to show an eight-hour film. We saw it as a film and we wanted to bill it as such, even if it will screen as a series. Luca was really excited about this possibility. We’d been working on it since the autumn of 2019. It was a beautiful thing in our minds.”
Regardless, “We Are Who We Are” is arriving this fall on HBO and a trailer for the series was released today. In it, we get some very Guadagnino-esque visuals, such as the beach, the beautiful Italian coast, as well as two attractive leads, young teens that are the heart and soul of the story.
The cast for the series includes Chloë Sevigny, Kid Cudi, Jack Dylan Grazer, Alice Braga, Spence Moore II, Jordan Kristine Seamon, Faith Alabi, Francesca Scorsese, Ben Taylor, Corey Knight, Tom Mercier, and Sebastiano Pigazzi.
Guadagnino’s last film was “Suspiria,” a change of pace for the director. known mostly for his Summer-set Italian stories (“Call Me By Your Name,” “I Am Love,” “A Bigger Splash”). The horror film wasn’t met too kindly by critics, who seemed turned off by the new direction the filmmaker decided to take in remaking Dario Argento’s ‘70s classic.
“We Are Who We Are” is set to premiere on HBO on September 14.
Here’s the synopsis:
Set in 2016, We Are Who We Are is a new coming-of-age story from Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) about two American teenagers who live on an American military base with their parents in Italy. The series explores typical teenage drama themes including friendship, love and overall confusion — only in this little slice of America in Italy.