24/06/2025 - The Sardinian director spoke with us about his latest animated movie which was seven years in the making

Following its presentation in the IFFR and a brief release in Italian cinemas, Balentes [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Giovanni Columbu
film profile] took part in the Annecy Animated Film Festival’s Contrechamp section. We met with the Sardinian director Giovanni Columbu to talk about his film, which tells the story of two rebellious friends in 1940s Sardinia.

Cineuropa: Let’s start with the genesis of Balentes and what made you want to move to animation.
Giovanni Columbu: This transition to another form of expression came from a critical moment I experienced after The King. After this film revolving around the gospel, I spent around two years selling everything I could to keep afloat, because The King left me in debt. The gallery owner and collector I’d sold various items to noticed that I had sketches on a table which I’d made before I’d travelled to Sardinia, when I still lived in Milan. He liked them and he bought the whole lot from me. This episode reminded me of what my first passion had been, before my passion for film, which was painting. Also, when I sent off the screenplay for Balentes to get a small financial contribution from the Ministry, I attached drawings which the judging panel really liked. These two things laid the foundations for me feeling incited to consider making a “drawn film”. And rather than starting with the art of animation, I went back over a century in time to the days of early cinema. Specifically, to the experiments carried out by the English anthropologist and photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who was the first to discover the mechanisms which have an animating effect on images: basically, photographs taken in short succession which give an impression of movement when shown sequentially.

What made you want to look back to the early days of cinema? And what techniques did you use?
I don’t know, maybe because it’s a period that fascinates me, and also because it spoke to my journey as a painter. Even when I started making Balentes, when I was taking photos of the drawings, I always photographed them in natural light. That passion for seeking out ancient solutions, which end up being really modern, helped me with my aesthetic research. For example, when I reproduced the drawings, which could take one or two hours, the light would change, and it resulted in variations which introduced a really interesting colour value, even in black and white. That “primitive” aspect of the technique, which I continually fine-tuned, generated a series of random imperfections which made me think physical film was the best suited option.

What are your painting influences?
I drew inspiration from the hyperrealist painting for which I’d learned the techniques and which consists of what we call an iconic paradox; in other words, a contrast between the surfaces and bodies of figures which are generally rendered using an airbrush for hyperreal painting, which causes colour to vaporise without any kind of internal structure, meaning that the colour spreads like a little cloud and its edges gradually blur. But this vaporisation is then contained by the outlines of figures, by way of pictures which are placed on the paper or canvas, and that’s how you bring about that paradoxical effect and that continual contrast between a plastic surface diluted by vaporisation and a perfectly clear profile. The hardest part was adopting that particular animation technique, which needs the images to be properly aligned. So the drawings had to be aligned during the making phase and during the photography stage, and we made a lot of mistakes in the beginning. But I realised these mistakes were important, because every mistake ultimately unearths a different vision and adds to the number of expressive possibilities.

But you also use other distinctive features in the film, like title cards…
Yes, I tried to reintroduce a silent cinema approach, where it wasn’t possible to tell the whole story so I summarised a handful of ellipses using cards. Obviously, using title cards can also create issues in terms of a film’s balance – you can’t use them excessively. But there’s another problem too, relating to so-called narrative art, where, sometimes, a word was presented on a piece of paper, but that word spoke to us in two ways: through its meaning but also through the writing itself. So cards aren’t only explanations, they’re also stylistic and aesthetic additions which help to reveal meaning. They have to act as interpretive keys, but you can’t rely solely on words; you have to be prepared to pay attention to emotions and to the material itself. I learned this lesson from the sculptor Costantino Nivola who taught me that every stone has its own character which should be respected.

(Translated from Italian)