18/01/2024 - After Sole, European Discovery winner at the 2020 European Film Awards, the Italian director is offering up a new youth-focused drama, now selected for Berlinale’s Generation 14plus

Selected for the 74th Berlinale’s Generation 14plus line-up, My Summer with Irène [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Carlo Sironi
film profile] is the second feature film by Carlo Sironi, who made his debut in the Venice Film Festival’s 2019 Orizzonti section with Sole [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Carlo Sironi
film profile], which went on to win the European Discovery FIPRESCI Prize as Best First Film at the 2020 European Film Awards. Written by the director in league with Silvana Tamma, My Summer with Irène is an Italian-French movie produced by Giovanni Pompili of Kino Produzioni together with RAI Cinema, in co-production with Julie Billy and Naomi Denamur of June Films and with the support of the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Sicily Region and the CNC’s ACM – Aide aux Cinémas du Monde Fund.

It’s August 1997 and Clara (Camilla Brandenburg, Rebecca in the fifth and sixth seasons of Skam Italia) and Irène (Noée Abita, who previously attended the Berlinale in 2022 via The Passengers of the Night [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mikhaël Hers
film profile]) meet for the first time during an organised tour of the hospital in which they’re being treated. One of them is shy and solitary, the other impudent and relentless, but they’re united by their age – 17 years old – and the illness which they seemed to have beaten but which still casts a dark shadow over their lives. When they come together, however, their fears disappear, and within a matter of hours they become inseparable… To the point of deciding to run away together to a far-away island where they can finally experience their first real summer.

These two young lead actresses are joined in the cast by Claudio Segaluscio, Gabriele Rollo, Beatrice Puccilli, Anna di Luzio and Maurizio Grassia. “That summer with Irène – Sironi explains – was born out of a desire to talk about that time in our lives when we’re struck by our first impressions of life, which ultimately feed into our identities and memories; that summer which we’ll never forget. I wanted to make a film which had the undefined substance of an eyes-wide-open dream and the surgical precision of our most important memories. The first time I imagined it I was listening to To Wish Impossible Things by The Cure: “Remember how it used to be / when the sun would fill up the sky. / Remember how we used to feel, / those days would never end”.

Photography is entrusted to Gergely Pohanok, who also worked on Sole, while editing falls to Chiara Dainese (Small Body [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Laura Samani
film profile]). Set design is managed by Ilaria Sadun, costumes by Olivia Bellini, and original music by Lionel Boutang.

(Translated from Italian)