Università Roma Tre

Screening of seven short films, documentaries and fiction (the works present a free passage of genre, from the narrative of the pandemic, in its hardest moment, that of the lock down, experienced by young filmmakers locked up at home and the story of their lives, sometimes staging themselves with wisdom and measure).

These are mature and well done works. The young people worked in teams of three: producer, screenwriter and director (they are absolute beginnings).

The first quality of the work is the ability to work as a team, another indispensable virtue and for most of the seven films it was realized, for others less, to the detriment of the result.

The sense of the team will be one of the topics of the course; in filmmaking there is no room for those who do not know how to delegate, it is important to rely on the collaboration of many people and to love the chosen actors.

The choice of these seven small films was designed in order to not ignore the dramatic moment that young people and everyone are forced to experience.

The stages of creation and writing of the screenplays, these are seven completed stories.

The preparation phase: the house, the right rooms, the furniture and objects (a fly buzzing solitary against the glass of a window from which you can see the glimpse of a deserted city). The decision of the filmmakers, created by necessity, to stage themselves, their life, their nostalgia, pain, loneliness.

How to make a working plan, how to establish the shooting methods, how to decide the time of the shooting, how much to work if it happens. For some who lived with their families during the lock down, the involvement of family members who become real actors with a precise role.

Shooting: for the works shown, shooting was a crucial phase, during which the authors clashed with the objective difficulty of the enclosure and the limit of their narrative field but this determined the development of many alternative ideas to the program established. Cinema is also the art of getting by, of finding bizarre solutions and experimenting them with courage.

Editing and post-production: even editing was a highly formative experience. Some films were better in the first stage of editing and worse when editing took too long. Here, too, one must have the quality of letting go parts of one's work without becoming too attached to it. It is a very useful exercise in cruelty.

I will ask the students to create a collective work, possibly shot with their cell phones and edited with their computers. To write it together with others and develop it as a team. I wish they would put in scene their desire for the end of the pandemic, how do they imagine it, what do they dream, what do they ask of life afterwards? I understand that it seems like a bold undertaking but a dream can be told in an image.

Suggested books: Il cinema secondo Hitchock di Francois Truffaut (Feltrinelli) e Il cinema secondo Orson Welles di Peter Bogdanovich (Il saggiatore)