Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis's The Tale of King Crab is exclusively showing on MUBI in most countries starting April 20, 2022 in the series Undiscovered.
The Tale of King Crab is the third chapter of a trilogy based on oral tales that we heard in a small hunting lodge in the province of Viterbo, in the Tuscia region of Italy. The hunters would gather together in this lodge after a hunt to eat, drink, and tell stories. Almost all of the people who play in this film are non-professional actors, laborers, hunters, and farmers from the town of Vejano.
While the first two films, Belva Nera (2013) and Il Solengo (2015), were documentaries, this time the story went back too far in time for anyone to recall, so we didn't have many elements to work with and these only lead up to the protagonist's exile in Argentina. So we went to Tierra del Fuego where Luciano was rumored to have gone and researched local stories that might help us imagine what he had done there. We found stories of pirates and gold fever, magical stories from the Indigenous population that once lived there, and stories of Italian emigrants. We mixed these with literature, especially Dino Campana, Bolaño, and Borges.
Our attempt through this film is to demonstrate how a tale that is passed on orally changes depending on who is telling it. Details become confused and different versions contradict each other. When the same story lands on the other side of the world, it intersects more stories becoming something new. A rural tale becomes a legend of the sea in the New World.