26/11/2024 - The head of TorinoFilmLab’s new programme dedicated to comedy development explained how it all works and spoke to us about the four projects it has developed this year

This year, a breath of fresh air blew upon TorinoFilmLab’s 17th Meeting Event by way of the pitching session - which four performers also took part in - for the four projects selected for the brand-new ComedyLab programme, which is dedicated to developing comedies. We chatted about this with the programme’s Head of Studies, Alec Von Bargen, an actor, director, writer and producer whose laugh is infectious.

Cineuropa: ComedyLab is the first lab of its type in Europe. How did it come about at TFL?
Alec Von Bargen: ComedyLab was born out of a need which had been clear for a long time. In England, the USA and Australia, working on comedy as a genre per se is considered fundamental and logical: comedy must have its place. TFL had already tried to incorporate a few comedy projects in its labs but, ultimately, comedy is so complex a beast that each individual project requires its own tailored help. There’s this global idea that comedy is incapable of crossing borders, but that’s not true. We have to work on the universality of the characters’ emotions and the film’s structure. So, last year, we decided that it was time to introduce a lab exclusively for developing different kinds of comedy projects, from light comedy all the way through to intellectual comedy. After four very hard years on a global scale, it was the perfect time.

What’s special about this lab is the collaboration involved with a group of performers.
We needed to create something totally different. I started my career as an actor and I’m familiar with the performance world, I know what an actor can bring if they’re generous and they apply themselves: they take such strong hold of the character that you, as a writer, discover things you hadn’t even seen before. The idea of bringing the actors along was to lighten the mood of the entire process, but also to bring filmmakers face to face with the truth of what they were writing, through improvisation and acting exercises. That way, the director gets to feel/hear the character’s heartbeat, whereas when you’re sat at a table with someone else, you can only imagine it. The pace at which things develop here is different to other workshops we’re familiar with: it’s more frenetic here, with more scope for changing things in a flash. The four projects worked together and individually, it was a collective work where we all did everything we could to push the directors’ creativity until they arrived at the final project.

How did you go about selecting the projects?
We all took part in the selection process too. We wanted four different kinds of comedies, for them to be a challenge for them as well as for us. The lightest and most universal was Honeyjoon by Lilian T Mehrel, where a mother and daughter travel to an island to commemorate their recently deceased husband/dad, and a whole new dynamic develops between the pair, who can’t stand one another. After the pitch, which we prepared together, the director won the one-million-dollar grant from Tribeca, and she’s already shooting in the Azores islands: which is an excellent result, I’d say. Then there’s the Egyptian comedy Bootleg by Reem Morsi, which is far more unexpected, and which speaks about the lack of sexual satisfaction among women belonging to the same culture as the protagonist, who decides to illegally import sex toys to Cairo and start selling them on the side to help local women understand what satisfaction really is. It’s a very funny film, but it’s also profound and political. There’s also a brilliant Italian comedy with a really unique voice, The Last Queen by Stefano La Rosa and Luca Ranucci, which is a beautiful story about a women who has set her dreams aside to devote herself to her family. One day, at a popular celebration, an old countess who lives on an Island in Venice sees her and says: you’re the reincarnation of Marie Antoniette. The woman decides to actually become her, and she goes to live with the countess on that little island, allowing herself the freedom to dream. It’s a really profound comedy which leaves you constantly smiling and is based on a sensitive character study. Last but not least, there’s a Ukrainian comedy called Midlife, by Oleksil Sobolev, about a man who wants to get out of Ukraine to go and look for his son, and all the obstacles he encounters. It’s a complex “Slavic” comedy but it’s told in a very human way.

How much time do you spend laughing in a workshop like ComedyLab?
We laughed like crazy, but comedy is a very serious thing, and you immediately realise that making a brilliant comedy isn’t a game, because what I find funny might be offensive to someone else. The brilliant thing about this workshop is that we all come from different parts of the world; you work on your project with an international audience who immediately react to the joke you suggest, and straight away you understand what works and what doesn’t. You can adjust things, but what’s left in is up to the author: it’s their project, after all. The success of this workshop was based around getting to the end of those ten months with directors who were happy with what they’d done and with projects which were ready to be presented to the industry and which mirrored what the directors themselves wanted, not what made experts laugh. And we did it. The next ComedyLab call is open until 13 December.

(Translated from Italian)