Rotterdam 2009: Trainee Project

Gaetano Maiorino
Better Things / First Impressions / Interview with Paolo Benvenuti / With Other Eyes

Better Things

Bright England! On Friday night two short films from UK (Bernadette by Duncan Campbell and A Necessary Music by Beatrice Gibson) won the Tiger Awards for short competition. Moreover, in the list of VPRO Tiger Awards movies, there was Simon Ellis' Dogging: A Love Story, a very funny and interesting comedy that talks about love and sex, in an unusual, fresh and technically innovative way. But another work is the real surprise of this Festival, and it comes from the Bright Future section. It's Better Things, Duane Hopkins' first feature film.

Tales of solitude, tales of desperation, tales of lost courage. Several characters barely touch each other in this powerful debut of the young English director. Mostly hopeless people, whose feelings are stunned by drugs, hate, anger and delusion, waste themselves looking for self-destruction.

A girl dies with a needle in her arm at the beginning of the film. Her boyfriend let her try for the first time heroin and now what he wants the most is just to join her anywhere she is, to pay his sin.

An old man and his wife live in silence. No more love seems to be in their house.

A teenager frightened by going out of her house, reads a book about love and takes care of her ill grandmother till she dies.

A young couple tries new drugs and have sex, finally feeling alive.

A girl can't make up her mind between two guys and makes a mistake losing both of them.

They're all lost souls stuck in a suburb of south west England, where love is not the answer but the problem and the biggest feeling is emptiness. The grey sky wraps in any shot these human beings who move silent in a sort of no men's land. Music is a rare apparition in the soundtrack, mostly composed by sounds of the nature, cars and by disturbing whistles that give the idea of a big void. But the most effective idea of the audio texture of this fascinating movie, is the sudden absence of sounds in those moments where a turning point is up to come: any other film would emphasize those shots, Duane Hipkins, instead, decides to create a complete silence, decides to leave his characters more and more alone with their thoughts. Like in an bubble ready to blow, like in an abyss from where is impossible to escape.

The sadness and the sense of powerlessness that Better Things communicates to us, probably reminds a masterpiece of American independent cinema, Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream. Even if their styles are very different, the artificial emotions, the only ones that characters can feel, and the never-ending research for love are common to both movies.

A very slow rhythm from the beginning to the end scans their lives. No virtuosity or technical creativity, the camera just shows what happens. The stories are combined and edited like a puzzle up to be settled. The screenplay doesn't say everything, just suggests and let the public play with the film, cooperating in re-constructing the character's background. A background without any point of reference for all the characters: no parents for the teenagers, no men for the young girl, no sons for the old couple. No one who guides or help, nothing but drugs and ancient memories: they both suddenly bring relief but at the same time they cause deep scars on the skin and under.

First Impressions

Arriving at the Rotterdam Central station, under a pouring rain that covered my eyes, I asked a man where to find the festival congress centre, and he answered "follow the tigers!". Actually, there are uncountable posters all over the city, with the symbol of the festival printed on, and that funny man, even if in a "poetic" way, just wanted me to find the way by following them along the street.

Today, at the turning point of the festival, that expression really gets a new meaning for me. Among the activities of the trainee project, the most stimulating part is being a member of the FIPRESCI jury. This task is both hard and extremely exciting: I'm realizing that to give my preferential vote to award a film isn't such an easy job! Sharing opinions and critics, analyzing in depth any detail of the 14 films in competition made by almost debutant directors, it's a work that demands a particular effort.

I do that with a group of expert cinema critics, people coming from different countries doing this job for so many years. They're giving me much more than I could even suppose: a deeper knowledge about the art of cinema, the pleasure of debating and discussing, the passion, the curiosity of analyzing movies from new points of view.

That makes me really feeling that I'm "following the tigers" in these days. It's a powerful boost that makes me feel more and more ready to challenge.

Interview with Paolo Benvenuti

There is a great deal of preparation and research behind all your work.

Basically I'm an historian, so my real job is the research. Then the medium through which I chose to divulge my research is making films.

Why are you drawn to the subjects you make films about?

I'm a curious person, mostly when faced with facts that are not completely clear. Everything according to me has an origin, but we often don't really know what it is. For example, everyone talks about Mafia [subject of 2003 film Secret File], but no one knows how and where it was born. The same happened with Jesus: his way of life and his message, have conditioned and still condition our lives, our mentality. I made a trilogy about that subject — Judas' Kiss (Il bacio di Giuda), Confortorio and Gostanza da Libbiano — which explains how Jesus' teaching has been completely twisted by ecclesial hierarchy.

The original ideal becomes twisted as the religion becomes more powerful?

Exactly. When the Church structures itself as a hierarchy, it has to find enemies to legitimate its power, so Jewish and women are the target. But Jesus was a Jewish who talked to Jewish people and he was the first one who made no differences between women and men.

How you choose how to start in telling a story?

It's always from a lateral point of view, I usually tell small stories to explain bigger stories — so I depict Judas to talk about Jesus, or Dora [Puccini's maid] to talk about Puccini, and the repentant Pisciotta to talk about Mafia.

So you change the usual point of view.

Yes, by changing the point of view, you change the meaning of a story — and provide a different perspective on history; I do that in all my films. I learned it from the great Italian director Roberto Rossellini: I asked him how to know where to put the camera and he told me the best position is the one that allows the audience to get the most of information from a scene. And that become my point of view in all my films, I always try to give as much information as I can.

Did the cooperation with Paola Baroni, who co-directs your last 3 movies, changed in any way your approach in filmmaking?

No, not so much. You have to know that my career can be divided in three periods, during the first one, from 1968 to 1983 I shot 16mm movies and the camera operator was my father, an Italian documentary director of 40s, so the films I made were the result of a combined work often done after very strong discussions and arguments. Starting from Il Cartapestaio, a ten minutes short movie, I started doing all by myself. I started working on a project, Il bacio di Giuda, a 35mm film that took me ten years to complete, and that was the beginning of the second period, during which I made the trilogy I mentioned earlier.
   Only the third period coincides with the cooperation with Paola Baroni. Thanks to her in my latest films there is more attention to female characters; they're deeper and have a very strong personality like in Gostanza da Libbiano and in Puccini e la fanciulla. We argue very much, but at the end we always find good solutions together, and our personal work always turns into a perfect symmetry.

With Other Eyes

On one side there is the industry, the big machine that invests lots of money in cultural promotion. On the other side, there is independence, an idea, a theory, more often a need. In cinema production, this dichotomy is even more true and marks the biggest difference between those producers that just take care of business, and those who still consider films as works of art.

In Italy, such a difference is extremely visible taking a look at numbers. The first of those is 592: the copies of the most distributed film in 2008 from Alps to Sicily, the national-popular comedy, Natale a Rio. The second number is 32: the prizes won by Carmine Amoroso's Cover Boy, the most awarded independent Italian movie in the last three years. How many copies were distributed of it? eight.

A similar datum can be shown for Giorgio Dritti's Il vento fa il suo giro: 27 prizes, six copies. And the list is even longer: Fine pena mai, PA-RA-DA, Fuori dalle corde, Jimmy della collina, Un altro pianeta, and so many others, shown only in few theatres and for a very short time, some of them still without a distribution.

Good films versus bad ones? No, it's just sure earnings versus risking bets. Maybe in Italy there aren't majors like in Hollywood but, also in this country, only few virtuous distributors give a chance to independent cinema: Arancia Film and Paco cinematografica are the most important among the others, keeping on fighting against the market owners, like David against Goliath.

Gaetano Maiorino. I took a degree in Cinema History and Criticism in Rome last march, discussing my thesis about "Cinema and Memory". During past years I wrote for some University on line reviews and since 2006. I work for the cinema magazine www.close-up.it. I usually write about Italian independent cinema but I also covered several international film festivals both in Italy and USA.
   I also worked for the past edition of Rome Film Festival and Linea d'Ombra Film Festival. I'd really like to have similar experiences also out of Italy, I think international film festival environment is great!
   What else... my favorite directors are Stanley Kubrick, Paolo Sorrentino and Christopher Nolan.

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