A new Italian western film short film “Anatomy of a Duel”

 

Anatomy of a Duel – International title

 

A 2025 Italian film short production [Ferrara La Città Del Cinema (Rome)]

Producers: Edoardo Rimoldi, Lydia D'Addario

Director: Edoardo Rimoldi

Story: Edoardo Rimoldi

Screenplay: Edoardo Rimoldi

Cinematography: Enrico Belisario [color]

Music: Jacy Grillini

Running time: 21 minutes

 

Cast:

Jim – Nicola Franz

Buddy -Lorenzo Neri

A cowboy has been riding for years in an eternal escape from himself. Every dusty sunset finds him in a new landscape, every new dawn pushes him further, in search of something he can't define: adventure, freedom, perhaps redemption. The truth is that he has never been able to stop. One day, in the middle of a desolate plateau, he meets a gunslinger camped. Man is motionless, mute, enigmatic. He doesn't say a word, he doesn't make a gesture. The cowboy, disarmed by loneliness and perhaps by his own tiredness, binds himself to him. He begins to speak, to tell, to pour his story, his doubts, his fears on that silence. He opens up like he had never done with anyone. And silence, instead of rejecting it, welcomes it.

What begins as a chance encounter turns into an invisible duel: not of guns, but of identities, of buried truths, of inner mirrors. The gunslinger, always still, seems like a vision, a symbol, a part of himself that the cowboy has always avoided facing. And the more the days pass, the more the boundary between reality and illusion thins.