Following the success of The Giants [+lire aussi :
critique
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interview : Bonifacio Angius
fiche film], Sardinian director Bonifacio Angius has returned to tell his own story, combining humour, tragedy and theatre. The subheading for this film - which was presented in Venice Nights within the Venice International Film Festival's Giornate degli Autori and which won the gathering’s Carlo Lizzani Prize for Best Italian Film – is, in fact, an admission: Confession – How I Found Out I Wouldn’t Make the Revolution [+lire aussi :
interview : Bonifacio Angius
fiche film]. Despite its explorations of Sardinian landscapes, the film transcends borders and unfolds in a non-place which is actually Angius’ mind as he looks back over his past and reflects, in this semi-biography, on universal themes such as family, the passing of time and human weaknesses. The cast stars Giuliana De Sio, Edoardo Pesce and an astonishing Geppi Cucciari as the protagonist’s sister, who tell a multi-layered story composed of visions and flashbacks and mostly inspired by Fellini in Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 – a movie which also revolves around a protagonist who’s trying to make a film. Written by Angius himself, the story is an intimate and visceral confession and a continuation of a reworking endeavour which bounces between visions and flashbacks and was initiated in 2014 with Perfidia [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film] before being continued with Wherever You Are [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film].

CinecittàNews: You started work on Confession before the pandemic, then you made The Giants and it was only afterwards that you picked this story back up again. How did that lengthy gestation period influence the form of the film?
Bonifacio Angius: During the pandemic, there was a pause, which is when we shot The Giants, an unplanned project which changed the course of my filmmaking journey. I create my films in a continuous cycle, one after the other, but The Giants altered my approach. After the pandemic, Confession underwent a change in production teams: the previous producers dropped the project. Over time, I found the film too rigorous and “old”, almost. Usually, I approach shooting films with the energy of a child unwrapping a toy, but this time round I was scared, as if it no longer belonged to me. I thought about giving up, but that would have created financial problems because of the calls we’d won, and a raft of bureaucratic issues. I was advised to write a monologue explaining why I was dropping the film, I wrote it in one sitting, and that’s when the idea to revamp the film came about. The monologue became central to the project, which grew and became bigger than before, with this enormous sense of enthusiasm. We took scenes from the old version and added new sequences featuring more vivid autobiographical events, building the film around memory and nostalgia.

Do you feel like this film helped you to resolve something in your relationship with the past?
I don’t know, we’ll see. There wasn’t any end to the difficulties, they actually increased. I was hell-bent on making the film, at all costs, and there were times I was scared I wouldn’t manage it. Not finishing it wouldn’t have been a liberation; it would have been a waste. It was a tough and actually quite a depressing time, because a film is never just a film: it puts personal relationships at risk and impacts the people around you. My son was in the cast and it’s not easy for a child to understand certain aspects of film sets, such as the length waiting times. But as we came closer to the end, I felt better. Once we’d finished the sample copy, I felt relieved, as if I were healing. The next challenge is working on the film’s distribution so that we can bring the film to cinema audiences, where I think it has great potential. […]

The film explicitly references Federico Fellini’s 8½.
8½ is one of my favourite films, and Fellini is probably my favourite film director. I’m 43 years old, just like Fellini was when he shot that movie, and that thought comforted me. But I didn’t try to do a remake of his film, that would have been madness. I spoke about my life, my nephews, my father’s story and the unfortunate things that happened to him. I’d told myself that I’d never become like him, but at a certain point I felt a similarity, and that’s part of the story too.

You mentioned the film’s humorous side. Was this a way of exploring your past in a sarcastic key?
There’s always a comic vein in my films, even in tragic scenes. In this instance, telling my story in an overly serious way would have been unbearable. It needed to have ridiculous overtones, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to handle it. I couldn’t take myself too seriously. […]

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