13/08/2024 - The experienced editor and producer tells us about her debut feature as director and the connection between memories and cinema

(© Locarno Film Festival)

Weightless [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Sara Fgaier
film profile], premiering in this year's Competition in Locarno, marks filmmaker, editor, and producer Sara Fgaier’s feature debut. In it, she explores what happens if one forgets the love of their life – in this case, it is Gian (Andrea Renzi) who has lost his memory. His daughter hands him over a diary he kept in his twenties, full of poetic descriptions and traces of a love story. In a conversation with Cineuropa, Fgaier discusses the path that led her to this particular story, the role of archival footage, and the relationship between memory and death.

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Cineuropa: How did Weightless become your feature debut?
Sara Fgaier: It’s a film that I had in mind for a long, long time, rather unconsciously. My original idea included a voiceover and fragments and traces of stories I had collected over the years, together with the archive footage you see now. Initially, I was going to make a film on flying, or about a flight. I had worked before on Pietro Marcello’s Lost and Beautiful [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pietro Marcello ­
film profile] as editor and producer, and then I made a short film called The Years, based on Annie Ernaux's story, but Weightless didn’t start as a preconceived feature. I already had all this archival material and I knew it wasn’t going to become a documentary. 

At what point did the project take a different direction then? 
The thing I was sure about was that there were going to be scenes from the Sardinian carnival. That was very important to me. Then, I realised I had a much bigger and much more ambitious project on my hands. Weightless became a travelling film shot in different countries, in different regions of Italy, and we crossed the Mediterranean. We even flew on a small aeroplane. We have an international cast, different languages, and at various ages. There’s a four-year old kid, there’s an untameable cat. It all came together rather spontaneously and it took on an unforeseen scope.

Can you talk about the relationship between memory and cinema and how you used the latter to translate the former in such a tactile way?
Working with archival footage allows you the possibility to build new worlds by attaching different meanings to images when edited and reconstructed in a different way. I would compare it to travelling; taking different paths, journeys, and trajectories, which in turn links to the special connection I feel with ghosts and death. The first book that I read when I was 12 years old was the anthology “Spoon River” [by Edgar Lee Masters]. Death is still somewhat taboo and that was another reason behind my fascination with the Sardinian carnival, which is such a peculiar ritual. 

So memory and cinema meet at the taboo of death?
Yes, the possibility of radically changing your life after a loss has to do with memory. Hence the idea of a story of a man who loses his past and has it reappear in a phantasmagoria of images crowding his mind, whether he has actually experienced them or not. 

My last question is about him, actually. I’m always fascinated by main characters who aren’t the main character in their own stories. 
Me too! I find that change of perspective fascinating. It’s something I know from the work of Arnaud Desplechin…

Oh yes, his 1996 film My Sex Life … Or How I Got Into an Argument, I recently saw it!
Exactly! So, if this film of mine is successful, my dream is to make a sequel told from the woman’s point of view. Since he is not aware of his own amnesia, she is the only one who’s able to tell his story.