23/10/2024 - Cineuropa met the producer from Italian company Slingshot Film who discussed Alberto Diana’s project

Founded in 2013 and directed by Manuela Buono, Italian production and international sales company Slingshot Films, based in Trieste, is present at the 46th Cinemed – Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival where it is pitching the project Intra montes by Alberto Diana to the development aid fund of the Cinemed Meetings (read the report).

Cineuropa: Why did you embark on the Intra montes project?
Manuela Buono: I started working with Alberto Diana on his documentary Fango rosso, which was set in the region in which he lives: the Sulcis, in the south of Sardinia, a territory riddled with abandoned mines, with traces of the industrial colonisation that this region suffered. The film followed two unemployed people who dreamt, in vain, of revolutionising their lives on this territory without any real possibilities of evolution. It was a rather pessimistic film about the way in which the environment is treated, as well as about the generation who lives in it. In 2019, it was selected in competition at the Turin Film Festival, and since we got along well, Alberto and I decided to keep working together, but this time in fiction. We therefore first produced his short film Frarìa, which was in competition last year in Turin and whose topic is very close to that of the feature project that we’ve started developing in parallel.

The plot of Intra montes begins in Sardinia and was initially inspired by an episode in the life of Alberto’s grand-father, which was then transformed in the script. It’s the story of a teenager in the 1930s who witnesses the murder of his disabled older brother by the Black Shirts. He remains shocked by this violence, but he doesn’t grasp the political matrix behind this act. A few years later, when he has to decide what to do with his life and where to find work, since his village is very poor, he decides to join the navy. Thus begins a travel story together with his best friend, who is more seduced by the fascist discourse and its ambitions of conquest, notably the colonial ones. He finally finds himself in Majorca, an island that was then occupied by Italian soldiers, and so they take part in the Spanish civil war on the side of the fascists. But the character has now become an adult, he now understands politics and why his brother was killed, and he realises that he is on the wrong side of History.

At what stage is this project currently?
Alberto has almost finalised the script but, and this is why we are at the Cinemed Meetings, we would now want to work with a Spanish, Catalan or Balearic writer, in order to integrate that point of view to the story. The shoot will take place in Sardinia and in Majorca and we will enter financing next year, both on the Italian side and on the Spanish one. We already have a French co-producer, Caroline Piras from Lilith Film, but we are also looking for a Spanish co-production of course, which is fundamental given the topic of the film.

What is Slingshot’s editorial line?
The company’s activity began with international sales and its production department is more recent, but the editorial line is more or less the same: films by young auteurs, debut features, fiction films, documentaries, hybrid works. We often work with artists coming from fields of expression that are rather close to the cinema, such as photographers, for instance, and who wish to start making a film. What’s important above all is to propose a cinematic language that illuminates and questions our vision of the contemporary world, even if it is a historical film such as Intra montes. As an example of the kind of filmmaker that interests me, Slingshot Films recently co-produced New Dawn Fades [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Gürcan Keltek
film profile], the debut fiction feature by Turkish director Gürcan Keltek, which had its world premiere this year in competition in Locarno, where the director had been in 2017 in the Cineasti del Presente section with his political and very experimental documentary Meteors [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Gürcan Keltek
film profile].

What are your other current projects?
White Lies, the debut documentary feature by Alba Zari, an experienced photographer whose short film Freikörperkultur we had produced and which went to Critics’ Week in Venice in 2021, is currently in the edit.

Do you sell your own productions internationally?
Absolutely not. I prefer to work on the sales of films that aren’t mine, and to have a seller for the films I produce. These are two really different roles and it is much better not to mix the two activities.

(Translated from French)