Almas en juego

see also

official site

click on the images to download them in high res

Almas en juego

Almas en juego

original title:

Almas en juego

directed by:

screenplay:

cinematography:

editing:

Ilaria Jovine, Andrea Campajola

country:

Italy

year:

2013

film run:

60'

format:

colour

status:

Ready (02/10/2013)

festivals & awards:

  • SGUARDI ALTROVE FILM FESTIVAL 2014: Sguardi Incrociati

Between Columbia and Italy, a trip to tell a modern love story.
He is Italian and had an affair with a prostitute. She is Colombian and she had an affair with a crack-addict, from which her child was born. Like parallel stories, an ocean between them, it seemed they would never meet. But a chat works a miracle and their lives change direction: they fall in love and go to live togheter, at first in Columbia and then in Italy in a small mountain village near to Rome, both still trying to find a job or reinvent a work.
The child, that they are bringing up together, reads "Pinocchio", recreating their crazy and romantic adventure in his own unique way.

DIRECTOR'S NOTES
I found the love story between Nicola and Diana at the same time a very modern and very old romantic story. There is the modernity of a meeting in a web chat and there is the romance of a man and a woman able to leave everything to follow their partner.
I was impressed by the fact that their lives, before their meeting, travelled on parallel tracks, as well as by the similarity of their profiles: both restless, both on the run from a violent and extreme past, both impatient of their two home countries (Italy and Colombia) and both eager to live in the country of the other, idealized as the land of dreams. These impressions, during the editing of the film, led me to progressvely alternate their words and tales. From listening to their stories came to me also the idea of keeping their vicissitudes within the ideal narrative framework of "The Adventures of Pinocchio", the novel by Collodi that their son Nicolas was reading at the time of the shooting. The "Pinocchio" used in my film, is not the Pinocchio who lies, but the gullible Pinocchio, ready to jump into every illusion and every adventure, but also ready to pay at his own expenses every disappointment. In short, the Pinocchio who lies to himself, as Nicola and Diana seem to do when they try to convince themselves that radical choices, such as leaving permanently their own country and escaping elsewhere, are the right ones at all costs.
In this way, Diana and Nicola, from their child and narratorreader's point of view, they themselves become the puppets still looking to become human, or better, two children still in search to become adults. For this reason, the inserts of the Collodi's novel gave the opportunity to show another reality, the reality altered by the fantasy. Another reality shown by small, art