Lord of the Ants

Lord of the Ants (Il signore delle formiche, 2022) is an Italian historical drama directed by Gianni Amelio — watch it online on iFILM. It reconstructs a real legal case: in 1968, poet, playwright and myrmecologist Aldo Braibanti was sentenced to prison under Italian law that criminalized same-sex relations.

His partner Ettore's father filed the complaint. Ettore was then subjected to electroshock conversion therapy. What followed was a public trial that drew in accusers, supporters, and a crowd of spectators with ready-made opinions. Luigi Lo Cascio plays Braibanti as a man of precise intellect — someone who understood ant colonies better than most people know their neighbors, and whom the state moved to destroy for living outside its definitions. Elio Germano is the journalist who keeps pushing at the case when no one else will, navigating censorship and institutional indifference. Leonardo Maltese, in his debut, carries the weight of Ettore's ordeal without a false note.

Amelio's film is unhurried and cold-eyed, angry not at its characters but at the machinery that ground them up. The injustice it describes belonged to Italy in the late 1960s; the pattern it traces is harder to date. Stream Lord of the Ants (2022) online on iFILM.