A highly dramatic mystery, in the footsteps of the classic thriller, marks the return to his first cinematographic genre for Pupi Avati, who last night closed the Film Festival out of competition with his new work “L’orto americano”, based on his novel of the same name published by Solferino, adapted with his son Tommaso.
The tenth participation in the film festival for the director from Bologna, who has always given a narrative of truth. And it was precisely by resorting to the concept of truth that Avati explained in a press conference the autobiographical element of his work, starting with the relationship with time. “There is a sort of coquetry in human beings that grows with the years,” he said. “Entering old age makes you feel the need to leave as many traces of yourself as possible and all inhibitions fall away. I am no longer afraid of sincerity and I go looking for it. Old people enter a second childhood: you become children again and, to find a certain type of reassurance, you make atrocious compromises and reveal things about yourself that you have never said.”
Always in line with the sincerity that someone who has earned a deserved credibility on the field can allow himself, the director reveals his evening ritual, apparently bizarre, but for him full of meaning, on which he built the character of the protagonist: «All the people I have loved are on a wall of my room that I call Via degli Angeli (his mother was born in a street with this name) – he said – A very thick wall, with many gold frames and two hundred human beings who smile at me. I say their names and in saying it it is as if in some way I opened the “penguin” of the air conditioning: they flow into my bedroom, giving me the guarantee of a peaceful night. Then I thought that the protagonist of the film could have this type of disorder, this “dilation of reality”, that is, thinking that there is something produced by our imagination or a wish that can exist, because faith is based on a wish anyway».
Set in the post-war period between Bologna and rural America, the film was shot in black and white («It’s much more cinema than any form of expression that can be remembered» – said the director) and tells the story of a young psychopath with literary aspirations (Filippo Scotti), with an unknown name, who has a crush on Barbara (Mildred Gustafsson), a young nurse in the American army, considered, only by a brief exchange of glances, the woman of his life.
The story will develop in the American Midwest, where the man will go to live a year later, in a house adjacent (in reality separated by an ominous vegetable garden) to that of the woman, where however he finds only Flora (Rita Tushingham), his elderly mother. Thus begins an intense search for the young woman with situations of the highest drama, which will end in Italy in a completely unexpected way.
“Iowa, where we filmed, is inhabited by people similar to our farmers,” added producer Antonio Avati, the director’s brother. “We were welcomed because as Italians we brought cinema to this state: a film crew had never gone to shoot a professional film.” Filming also touched Emilia-Romagna, the Po and the Comacchio area, with the full collaboration of the citizens and the regional film commission.
“I fell in love with my character and it is difficult to fall in love, even in life – said Armando De Ceccon, interpreter of Glauco, among the human cases of the story – Pupi with this film gave me the wonderful opportunity to learn the art of hurting oneself without dying, because in the film evil does not die, but neither does beauty die: what we would like to kill remains alive, like when we say that we kill a love but we cannot do it. In this sense the film teaches that “forever” has a meaning”.
The cast also includes Chiara Caselli, Roberto De Francesco, Morena Gentile and the Palermo native Filippo Velardi. Produced by Duea Film with Minerva Pictures and Rai Cinema, “L’orto americano” will be in theaters soon with 01 Distribution.