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ROME FILM FESTIVAL Competition / Italy

I Am With You: A mother’s love can change the world

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Guido Chiesa’s I Am With You [+see also:
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, in Competition at the Rome Film Festival, centers on a disobedient Mary, sweetly indifferent to the laws of the elders, who teaches her child to live like a free man, according to the principles of universal love. The film looks at the birth and the early years of Jesus, suggesting that, beyond his divine nature, at the heart of the prophet’s greatness was the upbringing and love of a mother.

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Said the director: “Christianity is the only one of the big religions of the world to identify in a woman the positive principle of salvation and a new course in human history. To see in the mother, thus in a woman, the foundation of all of humanity".

The film was shot in Tunisia with local actors, many of whom were not professionals, and Mary is played by a 15-year-old with a sweet smile, the daughter of a shepherd, Nadia Khlifi. She and the others act in the local Tunisian dialect.

"I had to find a human and natural setting that was as close as possible to Palestine 2000 years ago,” said Chiesa. "I found it in Tunisia. And Nadia was my ideal Mary. I didn’t want to ruin [the actors’] naturalness by imposing a foreign language on them. Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic are Semitic languages, thus related. We thought this was one way to bring the peoples together".

In Italy, however, the film will be dubbed for its November 19 release through Bolero Film.

The photography by Gherardo Gossi is suggestive of paintings by Caravaggio, Giotto and Raffaello, "but my model was Nadia’s real-life mother, who in the film plays Mary’s mother, and her calm way of speaking and gesturing".

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(Translated from Italian)

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