This year's hit film on the Naples Mafia, Gomorra, has been picked as Italy's contender for next year's Foreign Film Oscar.
Gomorra, Matteo Garrone's adaptation of Roberto Saviano's worldwide bestseller on the Camorra crime syndicate, was the unanimous choice of a selection committee including Oscar-winning stage designer Dante Ferretti, director Gianni Amelio and producer Aurelio De Laurentiis.
The hard-hitting crime drama, which won the second prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival, beat out four rivals including another Cannes winner, Il Divo, a portrait of enigmatic politician Giulio Andreotti.
''I was counting on this,'' said Gomorra's producer Domenico Procacci.
Procacci said he was particularly pleased at the unity shown in the vote after sometimes painful splits over candidates in the last few years.
He said Garrone's work would gain exposure at the Toronto, New York and Chicago film festivals ahead of the Oscar nominations on January 22.
Procacci added that Gomorra would benefit from an ''excellent'' distribution network in the United States through the top independent distributor IFC Films.
At Cannes Gomorra was greeted with five minutes of applause from the festival public, jury, and European Union culture ministers.
''It's a marvelous film, worthy of the best Italian cinema tradition,'' said top French critic Daniele Heymann.
''Gomorra recounts a frightening Italy, it scares me,'' said Margaret Bream of the Toronto Star.
''It's a reality I know very well, it's Iraq,'' said Iraqi journalist Erfan Rachid.
Director Matteo Garrone had said during the shoot that his adaptation of the Saviano book would be ''a war film - a war taking place just 150km south of Rome''.
Gomorra, a play on Camorra, is Italian for Gomorrah, the Biblical sister of Sodom.
Roman director Garrone picked five stories from Saviano's book to illustrate the Camorra's hold over Naples, its brutal use of kids and the drug and toxic-waste trafficking that feeds would-be glamorous lifestyles.
Saviano, a 28-year-old journalist whose round-the-clock police protection prevented him from taking to the Red Carpet, said he was happy with the ''realistic'' portrait of Camorristi who ape Hollywood mobsters while raking in profits that ''put Fiat to shame''.
Garrone, 38, one of a new wave of Italian film-makers, said he had got ''precious'' tips on ''how real Camorristi strut and preen before practising butchery'' from a young woman he met while shooting that he is soon to marry and have a child with.
He also paid tribute to the residents of a Camorra-controlled suburb of Naples where much of the film was shot - a couple of whom he gave cameo roles in the film.
''Though they live inside the Camorra 'system' they were still all over the shoot, giving advice and providing first-hand information,'' he said.
Gomorra shot to the top of the Italian box-office charts upon its release in mid-May, unseating Superhero, and stayed there for several weeks.
It is still showing in some Rome cinemas.
It has had few English-language press reviews but users of the Internet Movie Data Base have given it an 8.6 out of 10 rating.
