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Edgardo Pistone • Director de Ciao bambino

"Los adultos son los principales enemigos de la libertad porque no les permiten a los adolescentes disfrutar de su despreocupación"

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- El director napolitano habla de las herencias pesadas, de amores imposibles y de no-lugares

Edgardo Pistone • Director de Ciao bambino

Este artículo está disponible en inglés.

Presented in a premiere at Rome Film Fest where it scooped the prize for Best First Feature, and subsequently awarded the Special Jury Prize in Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival's First Feature Competition, 35-year-old Neapolitan director Edgardo Pistone’s first feature film Ciao bambino [+lee también:
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is being released in Italian cinemas today, 23 January, courtesy of Filmclub Distribuzione. Pistone, who previously walked away with the Best Director trophy in International Critics’ Week in Venice 77 for his short film, Le mosche, chatted with us about his drama revolving around an adolescent who’s forced to repay his father’s debts as soon as the latter is released from prison, and who falls in love with the young sex worker he finds himself protecting.

(El artículo continúa más abajo - Inf. publicitaria)
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Cineuropa: “Adults make the mistake of thinking young people are free, but they’re the biggest opponents of freedom”. This is the statement that your film opens with and subsequently refers to.
Edgardo Pistone: The film explores the difficulty every human being experiences connecting with their heritage, which is something we inherit from those who go before us. Adults are the biggest adversaries of freedom because they don’t let adolescents enjoy being carefree, essentially for two reasons: firstly, because youngsters are inheriting an ever-worsening world, and secondly because adults behave vampiristically towards them.

Does the film tell an autobiographical story?
The film is autobiographical in terms of the relationship the protagonist has with his particular context, but a lot of the story has been rewritten: I never really protected a young sex worker, but I did have people who asked me to work for them a few times, which I always avoided doing. The film’s different in that Attilio makes a far less considered choice than I did. The film is particularly autobiographical when it comes to my relationship with my father, with the group of kids who are formed out of memories I had of friends in my neighbourhood, and with my attitude towards female freedom. We’ve inherited a cultural and behavioural code where women play secondary roles and I’ve always refuted that. Attilio refutes it too, and that’s why he’s condemned by his friends and the cultural context he inhabits.  

It’s actually your father, Luciano Pistone, who plays the father in your film.
I had this idea of telling our story, thinking it would be a kind of therapy. I decided to involve him in exploring my relationship with him because I thought it would only be half a story I was telling if I told it on my own. The remainder of the cast I found on the street. The only actor is Pasquale Esposito, who plays Vittorio in the film. The casting process was a lengthy one, but it was fun, because it’s a curious thing to discover hidden talent, the unexpressed beauty in ordinary human beings. That’s what cinema is, for me.

The film was shot in the Traiano district, in Naples, where you grew up and where you still live to this day. The open space where Anastasia receives her clients seems an almost metaphysical place. What was the thinking behind this?
The thinking was primarily emotive, or rather that there’s a profound distance between people. The Traiano district conveys that feeling of a non-place. There’s an element of desolation and loneliness, which is hugely different from the depiction of Naples as chaotic, ferocious and fraught. My neighbourhood is a commuter town where you find open spaces and buildings like these, pervaded by a sense of isolation and neglect. Anything you might want is always far away, any kind of relationship feels like a far-off prospect.

The film is incredibly sophisticated in terms of its frame composition, camera movements, close-ups… The music is carefully selected too. What are your reference points?
One above all is Martin Scorsese; there’s always a relationship between individuals who are trying to play God and who fail miserably in his films, there’s discourse linking back to redemption, Catholicism – I’m mostly referring to his first film, Who’s That Knocking At My Door. There’s also a lot of Italian cinema from the ‘60s and ‘70s, there’s the Neapolitan director Antonio Capuano, and Emir Kusturica too, primarily Do You Remember Dolly Bell?. As for the music, I wanted the soundtrack to reflect the film’s two sides: on the one hand, classic, reactionary and refined, and on the other, working-class, given that it’s a coming-of-age tale set in a working-class district, which sometimes flirts with melodrama.

(Traducción del italiano)

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