original title:
Roma Termini
directed by:
cast:
Antonio Allegra, Gianluca Masala, Stefano Pili, Angelo Scarpa Hendrix, Costantino, Mery
screenplay:
cinematography:
editing:
Eliott Maintigneux
music:
Zeno Gabaglio, Sig
producer:
Bartolomeo Pampaloni, Edmée Millot, Andrea Ricciardi
country:
Italy/France
year:
2014
film run:
77'
format:
colour
status:
Ready (29/09/2014)
festivals & awards:
Rome’s Termini train station is the largest in Italy and the second-largest in Europe, with 480,000 passengers coming and going every day. Hidden in the middle of this bustling throng, there is a group of men and women who are not passing through, but calling Termini home: looking for food and shelter, begging, bartering, sleeping in odd corners when they can, or just hiding from the world. The station thus reveals its other side as an immense, anonymous dormitory that houses these people and helps them find a way to survive, on practically nothing. Four men, four drifters, and their stories unfolding against the impersonal backdrop of the train station.
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT:
Director’s statement Like many young filmmakers,
I found myself on my own, trying to get financing
to make the films I’d written, from home. After
months spent getting nowhere, I realized that if I
really wanted to make a movie, I had to go it alone.
I wanted a new kind of film, sincere, direct, one
that came from the street, from lives truly lived
and emotions just stirring. A film with no rhetoric
or hypocrisy, with no ‘safety distance’, but raw and
real, like life on the street.
So I took my video camera and walked those
streets, and went to talk to the hundreds of people
we go past every day: the invisible people, filing
past us, immediately forgotten, solitary souls
amidst the urban chaos. I brought no crews with
me, no script either, to let the people look where
they wanted, lingering on their daily lives in a
natural way, without any of the sensationalism or
sentimentalism of media rhetoric. It was my way of
staying human: try to show these people for what
they are, not for what they represent.