2021 has seen quite a few “pandemic-era” films get released. Some tackle the pandemic head one. Others tend to hide the COVID influences and showcase their lockdown aesthetic in other ways. But none of them are likely to do anything as unique as what Abel Ferrara has crafted in “Zeros and Ones.”
As seen in the trailer for “Zeros and Ones,” Ferrara’s new film stars Ethan Hawke as an American soldier that has to navigate the weirdness of a lockdown society while stationed near the Vatican. But there’s so much style and twists to be found that Ferrara’s film is far from your typical war feature. The film stars Hawke, Cristina Chiriac (Ferrara’s wife), Phil Neilson, Valerio Mastandrea, Dounia Sichov, Korlan Madi, Mahmut Sifa Erkaya, and Anna Ferrara (Ferrara’s daughter).
In our review of the film from this year’s Locarno Film Festival, we applauded the uniqueness of Ferrara’s feature and the message that seems to rise up from the story, “It feels deeply inorganic to Ferrara’s otherwise almost malevolently un-hopeful worldview that so much grime and gloom should end in daylight; ‘Zeros and Ones’ far more powerfully makes the case that any dawn is far more likely a false one, maybe just the light of exploding Molotov cocktails or a basilica burning on the horizon.”
“Zeros and Ones” arrives in select theaters and VOD on November 19. You can watch the trailer below.
Here’s the official synopsis:
In the aftermath of an apocalyptic siege, Zeros and Ones follows the American soldier JJ as he navigates a locked-down, murky world of fear, paranoia, and eventual hope in the shadow of the Vatican. A war between history and the future plays out until dawn breaks. A casbah-esque landscape of noir streets, the feeling of Paris at the end of the occupation – but set in today’s post-modern, ancient and unchangeable Rome.