Midway through the 81st Venice Film Festival, Italian director Giovanni Tortorici ranks near the front of the pack of the event’s most promising new director discoveries of 2024. The Palermo-born filmmaker, who spent several years as an assistant and apprentice under leading Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino, premiered his first feature Diciannove Friday on the Lido. The film is competing in the festival’s Horizons section, which focuses on promising work by first or second-time filmmakers. A coming-of-age film that eschews all the familiar tropes of the genre, Diciannove is a brutally honest portrait of what it feels like to be 19 years old, full of disparate desire, intellectually ambitious, and utterly lost. The film tells the story of teenaged Leonardo Gravina (first-time actor Manfredi Marini), a young man who is coming into himself while coming apart at the seams after he makes the sudden decision to abandon business studies in London for a literature degree in Siena, where he becomes increasingly obsessed with obscure 19th-century Italian authors. Wandering through the winding streets and mildewing apartments of the …