On June 20, 1992, a young, still unknown American director arrives in Viareggio (Lucca, Italy) to present his debut film. He is 29 years old, his name is Quentin Tarantino, and just a few weeks earlier he had screened Reservoir Dogs at a midnight showing in the Cannes Festival market. Invited by Giorgio Gosetti and Marina Fabbri, directors of the Noir in Festival, Tarantino is thrilled at the idea of screening his film for a real audience fans of noir cinema.
Thirty years later, the memories of those who met him intertwine and contradict each other in a collective narrative where truth and legend blur. Fragile, subjective recollections are contrasted with concrete archival objects: posters, merchandise, VHS tapes, toys, and Tarantino memorabilia fetishes collected, preserved, and displayed. Through these materials, the film reflects on cinephilia, archival practice, and the way cinema shapes collective memory, creating a layered narrative that blends documentary with essayistic meditation.
C'era una volra a Viareggio is a film about spectator memory, the shared pleasure of cinema in the theater, and the importance of festivals as spaces for discovery, passion, and encounter. A game of mirrors between what happened and what we remember, between what we saw and what we decided to take with us.

Director's Statement

There are memories that belong to us even if we haven't lived them. Stories that become ours through osmosis, affection, or a desire to belong. C'era una volta a Viareggio is born from this not from the need to document a minor event, but from the urgency to inhabit a blurred and contradictory story, like all important memories. The film stages the truth rather than seeking it, dismantles it, and gathers it in fragments. Every interview is a confession, every object a relic, every falsehood a form of faith. The editing was not a way to bring order and clarity, but to evoke. The film is an attempt to remember something I haven't lived, yet that somehow belongs to me as a viewer, as a collector, as a filmmaker.