What He Said

I love the cinematographic narration which respects the traditional narrative rules. I really enjoy movies with a good plot and well-built characters. I really like movies that are based on directing ability, staging and framing, and solving the harsh problems implied in the composition and screenplay of a film. I don't act as an engineer of cinema, I don't look for a technical quietness accompanying balanced contents, but I am not that kind of artist who hides his failure behind words such as "avant-garde," "experimentation," "shortage of equipment" because if I were able of avant-gardism and experimentation in the artistic meaning of the words, I would be more and more excited behind the camera.

Anyway, I'm not a filmmaker who gets lost following formal embellishment. I don't care about production stuff, that is to say a Kodak film rather than a Fuji one, the Dolby Digital Sound rather than the Dolby SR. I do my best for the story to be fully developed because I care only about the outcome. I pour unlimited enthusiasm in every film of mine, and I believe that, as a child who wants to learn to write must study grammar, in the same way there is an important grammar to learn about cinema: a strong, methodical, but also emotional, poetical, artistic and technical grammar. For this reason, even though I am 29 years old, I thought the best thing to do was to wait before making a feature film by myself.

So I tried to improve my narrative techniques through the creation of my newest short film, L'oro rosso (The Red Gold). But, most importantly, my new short film should not to be considered a study. L'oro rosso represents the film that I'm able to do today.

I'm deeply in love with authentic cinema. I never start from a precise plan. I always feel a strong impulse inside me to start telling a new story. Perhaps I have a penchant for social inquiries, but I fancy saying that I have a certain fondness for rewriting real life situations. At the same time, I hate cultural conversations in which everybody makes a wrong use of some terms like "documentary," "free cinema" and "cinema-vérité." I really hate those conversations in which people frequently try to hide their unsuccessful debut as a director as well as the faults of their films behind these labels. These labels are too often used to hide objectively poor ideas and justify a nauseating excess of recording.

But let's go back to my new short film. The written page is deprived of the founding element of cinema: the image that is characterized by a strong emotional and attractive power. For this reason, I prefer to speak through the images of my films. I think that a film has to be seen, so I'm not going to speak too much about my short film L'oro rosso. I don't know if my short film can be considered a film about social problems and if it can be helpful to understand our society, but for sure it has not this kind of presumption. I simply decided to tell the story of a Romanian mother who has been living for some years in the south of Italy, in Apulia. I focused the narrative prospect on the universal relationship between a mother and a child. At the beginning, the mother seems to live happily her ordinary life, but when her child asks her a simple and curious question, her mind goes back to a terrible past experience. So I told Erika's story. She has been living in Italy for 10 years. Today, this is her violent story, a story that will remain as cruel tomorrow and forever. 

Photo courtesy of the filmmaker.