02/10/2009

The first edition of the Rome Film Festival, in 2006, was good for his debut film The Salty Air [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alessandro Angelini
film profile], thanks to which Giorgio Colangeli won the Golden Marc’Aurelio Award for Best Actor and then began filling his resume with a series of debut films. Today, 38-year-old Alessandro Angelini is trying again with Alza la Testa [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alessandro Angelini
film profile] (“Raise Your Head”), another dramatic story about a complicated father-son relationship, also produced by Donatella Botti (with RAI Cinema and Alien Produzioni), on a €2.7m budget.

Once again – in part because they didn’t hurry to finish the film for Venice, in part hoping that Rome would once again bring success – the film will premiere in competition at the capital’s festival, on October18. It will be released theatrically on November 6 by 01 Distribution.

“Raise your head” is the mantra that father Mero (Sergio Castellitto) repeats to his 17-year-old son Lorenzo (Gabriele Campanelli), to teach him pride and to help him become the boxing champ that he himself never was.

Cineuropa: What type of film is Alza la Testa?
Alessandro Angelini: It is a film with an anarchical structure. It begins as a comedy, then becomes a coming-of-age tale, then a dramatic film on father-son relationships and, finally, a road movie with a very important twist. It is the story of a man forced to raise his son alone after the Albanian mother leaves them. And after he loses his son, he goes in search of what remains of himself. At the same time, it’s the story of an adolescent growing up in a very virile family of only men, who’s torn between wanting to fulfil his father’s wishes of becoming a boxing champion and having a carefree adolescence.

Why did you choose the boxing world?
It is a sport that is also a metaphor for life: the father teaches the son to protect himself from the blows he received in life. Plus, it’s a poor sport – even if you’re successful at it, it takes you nowhere – that I’ve been passionate about ever since I made the documentary Un Cuento de Boxeo, on Teofilo Stevenson, the Cuban boxing legend who refused to go professional and the stratospheric money that that brings.

But the ring is not the only important setting in the film.
No, the seafront neighbourhood in which Mero raises Lorenzo is also crucial. Mero is a specialized labourer who only knows the industrial area between Ostia and Fiumicino (places that also purposefully hark back to Pasolini) and who is then forced by the death of his son to move to northern Italy, to the border between [the region of] Friuli and Slovenia, where he will feel like a foreigner.

How was it working with Sergio Castellitto?
I built the film around him and being on set was an incredible experience. Sergio created the character along with me. I don’t consider myself a true director in the technical sense of the word. I’m not good at placing the camera. Rather, I “feel” what I want there to be in the story, and my lead actor helped me tremendously in this. He infused Mero with a great sensuality, the ambiguity of a “man-woman” who cannot accept having been left by a woman so pushes his virility to the max even though he shops, cooks, cleans house.

What do you think being in competition at the Rome Film Festival will bring you?
Festivals in general offer something that a simple theatrical release does not: seeing the reaction of a festival audience gives you a measure of your work, it makes you realize immediately whether or not the spectator gets it. Plus, Rome gave a lot to my first feature, The Salty Air, and I’m happy I’ll be there again.