original title:
iSola
directed by:
cast:
Elisa Fuksas, Alessia Correani, Michele Gallucci
screenplay:
cinematography:
editing:
producer:
production:
country:
Italy
year:
2020
format:
colour
status:
Ready (23/07/2020)
festivals & awards:
On the eve of the pandemic, I learned I was very sick. Practically at the same time, my best friend, whom I’d lost touch with, became sick herself, and this brought us together again. Springing from a sequence of unimaginable events, this film took shape in a new world and in lockdown, and was made exclusively using my cellphone. It investigates the power of storytelling, which is able to dispel the fear of living and dying, and it probes the mystery of every friendship, every faith.
Director's notes:
This story wasn’t conceived as a film, at first; it was meant to be an antidote to the fear of my disease, and Covid-19, and being alone. This is why I made the first story about myself: at a such a difficult time, personally and historically, I chose irony as a way to work through what was happening. Filming, and filming myself, with the only device I had access to - my cellphone - was not a stylistic approach; it was a question of survival. Spontaneity and immediacy were my bywords as I filmed everything just as it unfolded, as I experienced it, with no thought of propriety or appropriacy in an aesthetic or formal sense. What appears - what I appear as - comes later: I tried to choose the truth, which isn’t everything, but it’s a beginning.