The Italian producer behind Vermiglio chatted with us about the importance of co-production and the project she’s bringing to Cannes

(© Lorenzo Burlando)

After a lengthy period of time with Tempesta Film, Francesca Andreoli founded Cinedora with Leonardo Guerra Seràgnoli, Maura Delpero and Santiago Fondevila Sancet. This new firm produced Maura Delpero’s second work, Vermiglio [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Maura Delpero
film profile], which won the Grand Jury Prize Silver Lion in Venice 2024 and was chosen as Italy’s candidate for the Oscars. We met with Andreoli the day after the movie scooped an impressive 7 David di Donatello awards, including trophies for Best Film and Best Director, just as the producer was setting off for Cannes, where she’ll take part in the EFP’s Producers on the Move initiative.

Cineuropa: For the first time in the history of the Italian Film Academy Awards, a woman has won the Best Director Prize.
Francesca Andreoli: It’s a prize which fills us with joy, but it also makes us think. How is it possible that we haven’t had a woman director win the award in all its 70 years of existence? For too long, women’s viewpoints have been seen as marginal. But cinema should be composed of a variety of outlooks, it should embrace all points of view and perspectives.

The rules over the new tax credit system and selective funding have made access difficult for the majority of small and medium productions. What are your thoughts on this?
Tax credit has often been described as an “aid” for making films, but for people producing independent arthouse films it’s the very infrastructure around which we base our work. Without tax credit, films like Vermiglio wouldn’t exist. It’s a fundamental tool to support the kind of filmmaking that doesn’t come under the umbrella of large commercial markets. Cinema which has a cultural, social and economic function. Combined with regional funds, public funding and co-production mechanisms, tax credit is what makes it possible for us to make films which are deeply rooted in our country but which are also international. It’s incredible that instead of protecting and reinforcing these kinds of incentives, politics periodically jeopardises them and still fails to understand that investing in culture is never a lost cost: it’s a strategic choice, in terms of the kind of society we’d like to have, too.

Co-productions have always been a feature of your work.
When I was at Tempesta, I started working on co-productions with films by Alice Rohrwacher and Leonardo di Costanzo. My experience with ACE Producers was also fundamentally formative, because that was where I came into contact with scores of European producers. It really opened me up to the world of co-productions. For me, making a film means co-producing it, I’m not interested in making films about Italy which are only for Italy. Our work is increasingly based on co-productions, and not just for financial reasons, but because they allow for a blending of outlooks which always enriches projects. Sometimes, all it takes is a conversation with a co-producer to see your project with fresh eyes. There’s an inexhaustible pool of different talent and perspectives.

How did you put Vermiglio together from a financial perspective?
Something really brilliant, for all of us, was the possibility of making a film which made no commercial sense, a nigh-on impossible project that everyone would run away from. I was presenting a second work by a director who was still relatively unknown, set in a village in the mountains, without any kind of jaw-dropping cast, shot exclusively in dialect with subtitles, with all the accompanying distribution difficulties. But Vermiglio obtained backing from so many public funds, and we put together our financial plan based on them. I was convinced that Maura was talented and that, with the right resources and partners, this talent would find a way of expressing itself in the best possible way. We fought hard to create a work which wasn’t formulaic, to make a film which broke with any kind of approach which insisted on us including certain elements purely so that the film would stand a greater chance at wider distribution and being successful.

There are four of you at Cinedora. What’s your philosophy and how do you organise the work?
We like to work with men and woman directors – especially when they’re on their first and second films – who have a really personal vision but, most importantly, an urgency to their storytelling. This should lead to us producing films which are accessible as well as profound and universal. We share out the work horizontally, without hierarchies. Everyone contributes their own talent and experience. My background is as a producer, while Leonardo was closer to Maura in terms of her direction and perspective, when it came to Vermiglio.

What are you expecting from Producers on the Move and which projects are you bringing with you to Cannes?
It’s a brilliant opportunity to compare notes, it puts you in touch with other European producers who work on independent - and therefore pretty complicated - projects, like I do. It will be a concrete way for me to build working relationships, but also to meet people who are facing challenges like mine. I’m bringing a project called Me if You Want: it’s being written by Leonardo Serragnoli and Blaise Peters, who has African origins and who lives in London. The film follows an Italian man who discovers he might have a daughter in London and who sets off to England to meet this presumed daughter, who’s a DJ. He ends up travelling as far as Nigeria. It’s a film about the father-daughter relationship, about identity, the sense of belonging, how people can become a family even when it’s not biological.

(Translated from Italian)