Here’s a creative write-up for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Part 1), capturing its magical essence, characters, and themes. In 2016, J.K. Rowling invited us to step not through a brick wall at Platform 9¾, but through the weathered leather of a magizoologist’s suitcase. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them — the first installment of a five-film prequel series to the Harry Potter saga — is neither a simple creature feature nor a mere nostalgia play. It is a quietly radical story about acceptance, wonder, and the monsters we both chase and hide within.

Meet Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), a socially awkward, moon-eyed wizard with more affection for his Niffler than for most humans. Unlike the destined heroes of Hogwarts, Newt is an outsider by choice — more comfortable in a burrow than a ballroom. Redmayne imbues him with a fumbling charm and a fierce protectiveness that turns “fantastic beasts” from plot devices into characters with dignity. The film’s true magic lies in how it asks us to see creatures like the ethereal swooping evil or the destructive yet loyal thunderbird not as threats, but as refugees of a world that misunderstands them.

For fans of Potter, it’s a welcome return to a universe of endless corners. For newcomers, it’s a stunning standalone fantasy. But for anyone who has ever felt like a beast in a world that wants tame pets, it’s a roar worth hearing.

From the graceful, kelp-like Graphorn to the mischievous Bowtruckle Pickett (who steals every scene he’s in), the beasts themselves are visual poetry. The film’s set pieces — a mating dance with an Erumpent in Central Park, a rescue mission inside a magical menagerie suitcase — blend slapstick with awe. Director David Yates and the effects team create a menagerie that feels alive, not animated; each creature has a personality, a need, and a place in the ecosystem of the story.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them ends not with a triumphant cheer but with a somber rainfall of Swooping Evil venom, wiping memories from the No-Maj (Muggle) population of New York. It’s a bittersweet finale: the magical world is saved, but at the cost of the truth. As Newt walks into the mist, suitcase in hand, we realize the film is less about finding beasts than about finding compassion — for the creatures, the outcasts, and even the broken parts of ourselves.

While the misadventures of a treasure-obsessed Niffler provide laughter, the film’s emotional core is devastating. The Obscurus — a parasitic, destructive force created when magical children suppress their nature — becomes a heartbreaking metaphor for repressed identity. Through the tragic character of Credence Barebone (a stunningly vulnerable Ezra Miller), Rowling explores what happens when love is withheld and difference is demonized. It’s a dark, mature theme for a franchise often labeled “children’s fantasy,” and it elevates the film beyond simple escapism.

Magical, melancholic, and unexpectedly moving — a suitcase worth unpacking.

Where it was filmed 'L'ultimo Paradiso'

The director Rocco Ricciardulli, from Bernalda, shot his second film, L’ultimo Paradiso between October and December 2019, several dozen kilometres from his childhood home in the Murgia countryside on the border of the Apulia and Basilicata regions. The beautiful, albeit dry and arid landscape frames a story inspired by real-life events relating to the gangmaster scourge of Italy’s martyred lands. It is set in the late 1950’s, an era when certain ancestral practices of aristocratic landowners, archaic professions and a rigid division of work, owners and farmhands, oppressors and oppressed still exist and the economic boom is still far away, in time and space.

The borgo of Gravina in Puglia, where time seems to stand still, is perched at a height of 400m on a limestone deposit part of the fossa bradanica in the heart of the Parco nazionale dell’Alta Murgia. The film immortalizes the town’s alleyways, ancient residences and evocative aqueduct bridging the Gravina river. The surrounding wild nature, including olive trees, Mediterranean maquis and hectares of farm land, provides the typical colours and light of these latitudes. Just outside the residential centre, on the slopes of the Botromagno hill, which gives its name to the largest archaeological area in Apulia, is the Parco naturalistico di Capotenda, whose nature is so pristine and untouched that it provided a perfect natural backdrop for a late 1950s setting.

The alternative to oppression is departure: a choice made by Antonio whom we first meet in Trieste at the foot of the fountain of the Four Continents whose Baroque appearance decorates the majestic piazza Unità d’Italia.