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Alessandro Grande • Director of Regina

“The greater the problem for a young person, the stronger the relief is when it is resolved”

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- The director tells us about his feature debut, presented last November at the 38th Torino Film Festival and now winner of the Best Feature Debut award at the Olbia Film Network

Alessandro Grande  • Director of Regina

The only Italian film in competition at the past (online) edition of the Torino Film Festival, Regina [+see also:
film review
interview: Alessandro Grande
film profile
]
by Alessandro Grande has recently won, among other prizes, the award for Best Feature Debut at the Olbia Film Network. And it is in the Sardinian city that we met with the director to talk about his film, which stars Ginevra Francesconi and Francesco Montanari in the roles of a father and daughter divided by a tragic incident.

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Cineuropa: What has been the film’s journey in the past seven months, with a second lockdown in the middle?
Alessandro Grande:
From the moment it played in Torino, the film had, from the point of view of distribution, a complete visibility, and this despite the uncertainties of the moment. It came out not only via streaming on the main platforms, but also in a selective circuit of cinemas and now it is travelling through many festivals. What could have been a confusing period turned out to be a productive one, because it meant that the film was seen by a lot of people. We have won the Ciak d’oro, the Premio Bonacchi at the Nastri d’argento for Ginevra [Francesconi], the award for Best Feature Debut at Spello, and now the award for Best Feature Debut here in Olbia. The film is coming, not only to the screen but to the people as well, and this is a great achievement at a time like this.

The theme of Regina, that is, the disappearance of the father figure and of its educational function, is very current. What prompted you to tackle this topic?
Today more than ever, my generation struggles to take charge of its own risks and responsibilities, and so the next generation, without any guides or reference points, behaves crazy. Through reading books and watching movies, I and my co-writer Mariano Di Nardo realised that this topic had to be addressed. One essay in particular, The Telemachus complex by Massimo Recalcati, convinced us. It deals with the parental figure but also with the need for young people to recognise an authoritarian father who gives them education and order, and tells them right from wrong.

Father and daughter, from an initially symbiotic situation, end up moving away from each other. 
Recalcati also talks about the need to get lost in order to find oneself again, and in the film it is this way: the two characters are very united up to a certain point, but this tragic event highlights cracks that were not noticed before. The father is afraid of losing his daughter, and pretends that nothing has happened. But the girl is affected by the event and by the fact that she does not have someone by her side who knows how to guide her; she does everything, even crazy things, because she isn’t handling it well and doesn't know how to solve a problem that we adults know is unsolvable. The two of them drift apart then find each other again, and both grow from this separation.

How did you work with the actors to make the relationship between Regina and her father credible?
I took big risks for a feature debut. First of all, I entrusted a complex and difficult role to a girl of only 16, and the success of the film rested on her shoulders. Then, I wanted to shoot with long takes, without ever cutting away and I was already thinking about the editing on the set, because this story had to be told in this way to let the public feel empathy for Regina. And then, there were the weather conditions: we shot during the winter, in Calabria, in a mountainous territory where on some days it was so cold that it was hard to speak. There were a series of reasons why we needed to arrive on set as well-prepared as possible. With Ginevra, the journey began a year earlier because she did not know how to sing or play, and in the film she had to play a musician. She took guitar and singing lessons, and performed the songs live in the film. We did a lot of rehearsals, we talked a lot about the characters, and Francesco proved to be extremely open to this way of working. My method also consists in trying to get to know the actors as much as possible, since everyone reacts differently to problems and situations, and if you know that, you can manage them better.

Even in her short film, which won the David di Donatello award in 2018, the young actress had to confront something that was much bigger than her. 
In Bismillah, she was a young girl of just 10 years old who had to take on a huge responsibility: to decide whether or not to report her brother's illness, with the risk of having to return to the hell from which they had escaped. Regina is thin, fragile, she gives you the sense of a human being who should be protected and instead she finds herself growing suddenly due to an episode that will mark her forever. In both cases, the point of view of a child or a girl takes on a more significant value than that of an adult: the greater the problem for a young person, the stronger the relief is when it is resolved.

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(Translated from Italian)

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