14/08/2025 - The two Italian directors spoke to us with infectious joy about what drove them to tell a story both personal – based on their childhood - and universal

(© Locarno Film Festival/Ti-Press)

We met with Valentina and Nicole Bertani to discuss their film, Mosquitoes [+see also:
film review
interview: Valentina and Nicole Bertani
film profile], which has been selected in competition in the Locarno Film Festival. The directors chatted with us about the creative process involved in their first feature film made as a duo, but also about the power of the sisterhood and what it meant to grow up in the crazy 1990s.

Cineuropa: How did the idea for the film come about and why were you drawn to the world of childhood and the mythical era of the 1990s?
Nicole Bertani: The film came from an idea of Valentina’s. It’s an autobiographical story. Valentina called me, asking me to contribute my own point of view. That’s how the first phase of writing started, and then a screenwriter, Maria Sole Limodio, also came on board. Mosquitoes was a lengthy journey; we spent a couple of years on the writing alone. The film sees us exploring a time which we really lived through, it’s our best friend’s story, about the moment she came into our lives. At the time, we didn’t understand why we couldn’t go to her house as children, because her mum was so different. We decided to look into the mystery together.

Valentina Bertani: I always say that when I realised the story was interesting and that it could be transposed to film and made universal, the only thing missing was the reverse angle - as I call it - of my childhood: the points of view of Nicole and our best friend, Linda. Playing on my own has always bored me, and shooting a film is as similar to playing as I can imagine. We’ve told this story together, just as we experienced it together. When we started the adaptation and screenplay process, Maria Sole became a bit of a third child. We started to ask ourselves questions about what we’d been through. A sisterly relationship developed between us, which fed into a screenplay which we see as feminist rather than feminine.

Your film reminded me of Gummo (Harmony Korine), Kids (Larry Clark) and Welcome to the Doll House (Todd Solondz), but also of Courtney Love, Bikini Kill and the whole Riot grrrl movement and rave scene. What references did you actually have in mind for the film?
VB: Todd Solondz is our main reference; he’s the father of dark comedy, as we understand it. And it’s something we’re missing in Italy. We’re curious to see how the audience will react, given that it’s not used to this kind of tone in Italian films. As for the character of Eva, she’s quite a lot like Courtney Love, but that wasn’t intentional, that’s how she really was.

Personally, I consider your film to be a feminist and queer ode, a cinematographic utopia which tears down binaries, whether in terms of men and women, adults and children, or humans and animals. This makes it a militant film where nothing is off limits. Would you agree? Do you believe in the anticonventional power of cinema?
VB: I’m honoured by that definition, which seems very fair to me. We did want to shake off and free ourselves from binaries, and I definitely agree the film could be considered a queer work. Given that me and the screenwriter are both queer, it was unlikely, consciously or unconsciously, that it wouldn’t be a queer film. As for our queer characters, our babysitter at the time really was called Carlino and he’s very similar to the character depicted in the film.

NB: We were really fond of him. He was already an openly gay man back in ’97, who wore fully denim outfits and had bleached hair. Coming out as gay these days is very different to the ‘90s, when it came with a kind of stigma.

I found the way you explore drug addiction really interesting. It could be shocking in a film where the protagonists are children, who are often seen as fragile, pure and naive.
VB: You’ve hit on a key point about the film. The first time we shared this idea with our creative director, he told us that drugs and children don’t mix. Our response was that this was based on our experience and that we couldn’t not talk about it, even if the protagonists were children. Why should we censor and distort our reality? Our childhood is linked to a specific moment in history when drugs were a part of the adult world. When we were small, we didn’t fully understand what was happening around us, but we still bore witness to it.

(Translated from Italian)