Following a premiere in the 82nd Venice Film Festival’s Giornate degli Autori line-up, Loris G Nese presented his documentary debut, A Near Thing [+lire aussi :
interview : Loris G. Nese
fiche film], in the 30th Linea D’Ombra Festival in Salerno, the city where the director was born and where he dug around to find out who his father really was, having been killed by five gunshot wounds when the former was only 4 years old.

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Cineuropa: What made you want to turn your personal story into a film?
Loris G Nese: It came from a slightly irrational need to explore the things I was hearing from different sources: from the news, family stories and from strangers who, for some reason or another, recognised me in the street and felt the need to say something to me. It’s a film about certain divides associated with marginal areas in my city, but it’s also about the way we tell this kind of story. When I first started thinking about it, around ten years ago, I was in a post-Gomorrah [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Domenico Procacci
interview : Jean Labadie
interview : Matteo Garrone
fiche film] context where stories about Campania were heavily influenced by highly coded forms of narration. As a teen, and as a viewer, I grew up on films by Scorsese, De Palma and Coppola, and certain stories seemed to be my story too. So I tried to tell my own story within the film, attempting to avoid a linear or preconceived viewpoint, whilst also trying to include the paradoxes of all those different voices and stimuli which came from various sources.

Your film blends together documentary, autobiography, archive material and animation. It’s an incredibly creative work but it also includes the more traditional talking heads. How did you combine these different forms?
As I watched my home videos, I started to become aware of the different forms I could include, alternating them with narrative sequences and placing myself face to face with the people who were with me when my identity was taking shape. The talking heads were my starting point, as often happens with documentaries: you start out trying to piece things together, and you research as you film. This research allowed me to create a structure through which I could then mix things up a little and combine different languages - languages which came from other, more official material and which offered a viewpoint which contrasted with my family’s. There was the perspective of the news, for example, which conditioned my upbringing, because it was my first introduction to this story about my family, but in a context which also encompassed the city, and the entire country actually. That was also when I started looking for alternative forms, which weren’t only anchored in the physical nature of the images, bodies and voices, but which also conveyed the impossibility of depicting the feelings and paths I’d experienced.

The film talks a lot about your father, but we don’t see his face until the final frame.
This is something I decided with Chiara Marotta, the film’s editor and producer, during the editing phase. It comes from the need to evoke the presence of someone when we’re not sure where they are, because this film is also a journey into my own past, an attempt to seek out the people who preceded and conditioned my present in some way. This is conveyed through the various attempts the character makes throughout the story, starting from childhood, continuing into adolescence and on into adulthood, and it’s only when he starts to put the different pieces together in all this chaos that he can begin to decipher some sort of shape.

There are two narrating voices in the film: one belonging to Francesco Di Leva and the other is his 15-year-old son, Mario Di Leva. How did this collaboration come about?
It came from my previous short film, Z.O., which was a way for me to try to delve deeper into this story in fiction form (via animation, on that occasion), where I also used a hybrid language to explore certain dynamics associated with the outskirts of Salerno. We did something that people don’t often do, which was to look each other in the eye and try to find the best way to say certain things. The transition felt really natural with Mario because, at a certain point, I felt the need to include a post-childhood voice in the story. Working with two actors who are father and son and who are playing the same character years apart was a one-of-a-kind opportunity.