see also
original title:
Almas en juego
directed by:
screenplay:
cinematography:
editing:
Ilaria Jovine, Andrea Campajola
production:
country:
Italy
year:
2013
film run:
60'
format:
colour
status:
Ready (02/10/2013)
festivals & awards:
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