Tekla Taidelli’s second feature film, 6:06 [+lire aussi :
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interview : Tekla Taidelli
fiche film], which was presented in a premiere within the Giornate degli Autori’s Venice Nights in Venice, and awarded the SIAE Creative Talent Prize, tells the story of Leo, a twenty-six-year-old trapped in a cycle of addiction and monochrome days, and caught between precarious work and an obsessive desire to lose himself in his next fix. His life changes when he meets Jo-Jo, an enigmatic twenty-year-old French man who lives in a caravan and who has his own demons to battle. Together, they embark on a journey of liberation to Portugal where their broken yet complementary souls find universal dialogue. Twenty years on from her debut with Miss Hit (2005), an intense story about love and drug addiction which was selected for Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present section, Taidelli is returning to film after dedicating years of her life to her Street Cinema School, founded in 2013 in Milan, where she teaches others to lend voices to invisible souls using the texts of great authors such as Shakespeare and Pasolini.

CinecittàNews: Twenty years on from your first film, 6:06 almost feels like a second debut for you. What have these twenty years meant to you? How have they influenced your return to film?
Tekla Taidelli: Making independent films is a challenge, especially for people like me who work outside of the box. After my first film, Miss Hit, I was scarred by the true story behind it, relating to my ex-boyfriend and the world of addiction. It was a crushing blow: lots of people I was close to died, and I fell out of love with cinema. After seeing my film, Claudio Caligari said: “Welcome to the list of the damned, you’ll make three films”. I’ve made my second, 6:06. But I never stopped making films: I founded a film school to lend a voice to invisible people, working with homeless people, street musicians and fishermen, and reworking texts by great authors, such as Baudelaire and Pasolini, with them.

So you never left cinema behind, but you chose a different path. What made you want to direct 6:06?
Jacopo Pica from Illmatic Film Group convinced me. He let me stay with him in Rome for a film course, and he encouraged me to make a second film. It led to a call, “Film and the streets”, where my students could propose film subjects. At the last minute, Leonardo Roberto sent me a one-pager for 6:06, an idea for a black and white film about the cycle of addiction. It immediately blew me away: it was different from my usual creative process which was inspired by my own life, as was the case with Miss Hit. Here, I speak about my rebirth, inspired by an extreme, punk life, but also by the desire to send a message full of light.

The film speaks of rebirth, a universal theme. How did you develop this story and its message?
6:06 started out as a medium-length film in black and white, with only an instant of colour to represent the rebirth in question. In Portugal, when I showed the project to surfer friends, they said: “You live in colour now, at last; you can’t go back to black”. I rewrote the screenplay and made it more universal. It’s a manifesto for disillusioned young people post-Covid, who are often lacking ideals. But it’s also a message for independent cinema: a collective film made with people who I call “pirates”, my collaborators, who put their hearts and souls into it, despite production challenges. We became a family on set and shared a profound human experience together.

Ultimately, the film tells us that “we can’t save ourselves all by ourselves”. Is this a lesson you’ve learned in your own life?
Absolutely. It’s not only romantic love that saves you; it’s love from all kinds of people: friends, brothers and sisters from off the street… My biological family was in ruins, but other people’s love saved me. In the film, the protagonist escapes the cycle thanks to another broken soul just like him. Love in all its forms is what moves the world and offers second chances. […]

There are echoes of the pandemic in the film, where the protagonist lives in a temporal loop. How did you tackle the theme of the new generations and their relationship with drugs?
Young people today are different from us. They’re more sensible but they’re also more disillusioned, “frazzled” by social media and lacking ideals. Their relationship with drugs is more destructive: in my day, heroine or crack were known for how damaging they were, but nowadays people take them without any kind of awareness. But when I meet young people in my school, I find some beautiful souls. 6:06 speaks to them and tries to raise their awareness in a chaotic world where we casually scroll through pictures of war on our phones.

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