A lively and hyper-connected child spends the summer in Sicily with his grumpy old aunt who lives out of time, in a world dominated by a magical sense of religion. From this encounter between modernity and the past, reason and religion, a deep connection will be born, expressed with irony and stupor in Sweetheart [+lee también:
crítica
entrevista: Margherita Spampinato
ficha de la película], selected in the Filmmakers of the Present section of Locarno, where it received the Leopard for Best Performance (Aurora Quattrocchi) and the CINÉ+ Special Jury Prize (see the news). We talked about it with director Margherita Spampinato.

Cineuropa: Sweetheart seems to draw upon lived experiences. How was the project born?
Margherita Spampinato: The film is entirely inspired by memories from my childhood. Every summer, my parents would send me on holiday to Sicily, to stay with my two unmarried aunts and they were very affectionate with me, unlike Aunt Gela in the film. I come from a secular family, without rules, my mother is a super feminist, while my aunts would take me to church, they’d force me to take naps, there was a game made up of rituals in which I’d transform myself and for me, it was beautiful, the only little girl amongst all these women, my aunts and their friends, who even sewed my clothes by hand. For me, it’s a very sweet memory.

Why did you decide that the protagonist would be a boy?
At first, it was a little girl. But it seemed to me that I was losing the comic potential that would derive from the confrontation between a boy and these old women from the south. The character was in fact based on my son and his friends, who really make me die laughing when I listen to them talk about love, religion or any other topic. I liked the idea of such a rational little boy sent into that magical world, where things are “felt”, spirits exist. This kid growing up with these women, who make him discover a magical language, seemed fascinating to me. I played with these beliefs and symbols related to death, separation and mourning, which represent the “secret” past of Aunt Gela and the child’s fears about being separated from his nanny.

You managed to get as much naturalism from a veteran actress such as Aurora Quattrocchi as from the young Marco Fiore.
Aurora is wonderful, a great actress. I already had her in mind when I was writing. After sending her the script, I went to her house and it happened to be her birthday, and I ended up having dinner with her whole family. Aurora is very nice, completely different from the character in the film and she transformed immediately when she first read the script. She’d also had “spinster” aunts, it was immediately obvious that she knew the character perfectly, she had her inside of her. As for Marco Fiore, I have a lot of casting experience and when I met him, I knew right away that he was Nico. The character belonged to him and when a child has a talent for acting, he suddenly enters that magical world of the “imaginary circumstances” that Sanford Meisner talked about and moves through it as though it were real.

In addition to writing and directing the film, you also edited it. Why that choice?
I wrote the script by myself and I edited the film only due to budget restrictions. I loved this project so much that I ventured into it. On set, we used the script like a bible, and in the edit I didn’t have many surprises, I only cut out a few extraneous scenes. But the big help, as much in the writing and in the editing stage, I received from director of photography Claudio Cofrancesco, who is my husband. Claudio has shot more than 150 films, he has so much experience. I was therefore lucky to benefit from his guidance as well as that of Gianluca Arcopinto, a wonderful producer and immensely passionate, who has shown great respect towards my project.

The film has already been sold in some territories, such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Argentina, Brazil. What kind of audience do you expect?
The essence of the film is the need we have to listen to each other; to be together, to be connected. It’s a universal concept. In Locarno, the audience, which wasn’t only Italian, really enjoyed themselves. I hope the film’s ironic touch can also be appreciated.