Au-delà du ring
Nathalie Rossetti
2008 - 57 min - DV Cam - Couleur - Belgique, Italie

Through the passion of two athletes, Michele di Rocco, Italian champion of the super light weights and Maria Rosa Tabbuso, European champion of the flyweights, we discover the mechanisms behind a boxing event.
Michele, twenty-three years, is a ROM with amber skin, large blue eyes, married and already the father of two children. Maria Rosa is thin, long red ringlets, a Sicilian born in Belgium, works in her hairdressing salon in Boccea, Rome.
Their career of boxers is managed by the Umberto Conti Cavini and his wife Rosanna, first woman in the world who organises boxing events.
The documentary tells of the boxers' tensions in the cloakrooms before and after the fight. The assembly of the ring. The construction of the show, of Rosanna?s obsession with the importance of image: beauty parlours, jewels, long regal dresses to go up on the scene with its athletes. The howls of the audience are able to condition the verdict of a fight. Michele's and Maria Rosa?s relationship with their trainer who, behind the ring is untiring, suggests and mimes the knocks. The role of the family as a stimulant to fight, the adversaries' regard, sometimes rancour. The training, the exhaustion, the dissatisfaction, the challenges. Lastly, on the one hand Michele di Rocco with the responsibility of his family and his nine sisters and on the other hand the loneliness and the passion of Maria Rosa Tabbuso. The dreams and the hopes of the one and of the other

With humour and poetry this documentary tells another way of living boxing.