Italian director Giovanni Tortorici talks about his latest film, Ketticè, presented in the International Competition at the Locarno Film Festival.

Cineuropa: The film seems to have a strong autobiographical component. How did you find the correct distance you needed to turn your memories into a cinematic narrative?
Giovanni Tortorici: The film emerged after I had finished Nineteen, my first feature. At that point, I came across an old screenplay I had written when I was 22. It happened to be about the time when I was 16. I felt a kind of nostalgia for that world, which had been so important and formative for me and which, in the meantime, I sensed was melting away. I wanted to refocus on a reality that, by then, had almost been lost. At the same time, that story offered me the chance to explore themes that interest me greatly, such as power relations between the individual and the family, between the individual and institutions - and, in particular, the relationship with school. It was also a period when I was reading a lot about psychoanalysis, as well as Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. Today, perhaps we don’t talk so often about school as a repressive, bourgeois institution; it feels like a perspective that has been lost somewhat. Work on memory, trauma and self-analysis thus became pivotal. In a sense, the movie also grew out of this attempt to go back and interrogate what I had experienced.

There is a very strong humorous component to the film, but also something delightfully decadent and excessive. I’m thinking, for example, of the character of the mother. Are there any specific cinematic references behind this tone?
There are certainly some directors who are dear to me, such as John Waters and Harmony Korine, who are important to me and form part of my education. But I have to say I didn’t approach the work by consciously starting from those references. Perhaps it came quite naturally to me to lean into it a bit in places. I think cinematic and media representation often tends to make reality more serious than it is. In life, by contrast, situations can have a strong component of unintentional comedy to them. In my view, we laugh more often in life than in films. So, in trying to be realistic, it felt right to let comedy in, even in more serious contexts, perhaps when talking about power dynamics or potentially dramatic situations.

In the film, the girls are strong and even brazen; they seem to challenge traditional stereotypes of femininity. How did you build these characters?
I really liked the idea of showing - through Ketty, for instance - a kind of non-conformism. When she decides to argue and get physical with the other girl because she keeps spreading things around about her, a sort of "shitstorm" breaks out immediately. I think she’s a profoundly non-conformist character. And I believe that, in her case, violence can also be read as a response to an oppressive system. Being constantly judged, constrained and defined by others produces a form of oppression. From this point of view, her violence is a reaction: it is not a submission to that dynamic.

The relationship between Ketty and Giulio eludes more conventional categories. It’s not simply a romantic relationship, nor a simple friendship: it seems to be mostly a form of mutual support.
Yes, that’s exactly what interested me. Their relationship doesn’t have to fit into the categories we’d expect to find in a teen movie. It can be at once friendship, support, complicity, and perhaps also something romantic. But above all, it’s a bond between two people who share a certain difference and a certain pursuit of non-conformism. I was very keen to portray that kind of connection without having to define it entirely.

One of the most striking things about the movie is precisely how it depicts teenagers. At times, people might consider certain behaviors or dialogue to be over the top, but they actually feel very authentic. Was that a deliberate choice?
In my film, I wanted to restore that spontaneity, even when it might seem excessive. I think it’s important to allow teenage characters to be teenagers, without necessarily turning them into mouthpieces for a thesis or miniature adults. Ultimately, that’s also what I wanted to recover through the film: not only a period of my life, but also a certain way of being in the world that I now feel very far from and which, precisely for that reason, I needed to look at again.