The Jewel (Il Gioiellino) (M)

The great scandal of Parmalat SpA Italy was Europe`s Enron and still holds the dubious record of being the largest European bankruptcy with a debt of 14.3 billion dollars. Director Andrea Molaidi (The Girl by the Lake) focuses on the human side of this story and the subordination of individual interests to the demands of the family. The founder, Amanzio Rastelli, placed his closest relatives including his son and niece in key positions in the company despite the fact that they had little experience. What followed was gross corporate incompetence, desperate political maneuvering and fraud that ultimately left 100,000 investors with their money wiped out overnight. Molaidi has teamed up with Toni Servillo (Il Divo), one of Italy`s top actors working today, as well as Gabriele Romagndi and Ludovica Rampoldi, to dramatise this story of unscrupulous greed. The names of the real life characters have been changed as the drawn out legal appeals continue but bizarrely Parmalat, trading under a range of other names, is still going strong.