We chatted with Swiss director Erik Bernasconi, who presented Becaària [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Erik Bernasconi
fiche film] in the Solothurn Film Festival where it scooped the Audience Award. Set in Ticino in the 1970s, the movie follows the ups and downs of a young man who’s trying to find himself.

Cineuropa: How did the story in the film come about? Why is it set in Ticino?
Erik Bernasconi: The film is based on a first novel, published in 2010, by Ticino-born writer Giorgio Genetelli, who I met for the first time on the set of a film where I was assistant director and which he was working on as an extra. We saw each other again in Verscio that same year, in 2010, during a screening of my first film, Sinestesia. After the film was presented, he told me that he’d just published a novel and that he’d like me to take care of the film adaptation. I read it and really enjoyed it. It’s been an adventure that’s lasted fifteen years; the project had always been there in the background, until it was possible to bring it to life.

What really drove you to tell this story? Besides the fact that you liked the novel, was there anything in particular that moved you?
Yes, the novel definitely spoke to me on a personal level. I wouldn’t say the film is autobiographical in the stricter sense – it isn’t. But there’s a similarity in generational terms. I was born in 1973 and the main character was born in 1960, so there’s barely half a generation between us. I think what struck me the most was the niggling malaise of adolescence, which is keenly felt in the novel. A malaise which can obviously be painful, but it's beautiful as well as dramatic. It’s something that a lot of people go through and which stays inside of us. That feeling really moved me and I tried to keep it alive in the film adaptation. The film has the same profound soulfulness as the novel but, naturally, we’ve made a few narrative adjustments: it’s not a literal transposition of the novel, it’s an adaptation which tries to translate those emotions into images.

Visually speaking, the film is incredibly powerful when it comes to nature, the landscape but also the aesthetic which interweaves poetry and pop culture. Would you agree?
Absolutely, I do, and I’m really pleased to hear you say that. That pop, “naive” side was something I was really interested in, and the sense of humour associated with these Ticino characters. I wanted to avoid a folkloric or caricatural approach, but I did want to ensure a lighter, warm-hearted and occasionally comic approach.

The film follows a teenager looking for his place in the world, but without the traditional move to the big city. In fact, the main character ends up in a village, in the suburbs of the suburbs, practically speaking. Why?
It was that paradox that really interested me. Often in these kinds of stories, the growth journey takes place by way of a city, an escape, a town centre. But in this instance, the main character discovers the world by delving deeper into the suburbs. This isn’t a story specific to Ticino: it depicts the journey taken by anyone living in the suburbs more generally. Anyone who’s grown up in the suburbs will recognise that strange, almost counterintuitive tendency. I was interested in the idea that the novelties of society and the wider world could come from a place which seems immobile, to all intents and purposes.

What does it mean to you to be a Ticino-born director working in Ticino?
It’s a brilliant question. It’s what I ask myself at the end of every film. I’m 53 years old, so not very young anymore, but hopefully I still have a career in front of me. Every time you finish a film, it’s not like you’re starting again from scratch, but you’re not far off: every project needs to be reconstructed, financed, championed. In Ticino it’s really hard to produce films, and I sometimes wonder whether it would be easier to go somewhere else, even if just a different region of Switzerland. But there are two things to remember. The first is that I feel it’s my duty to keep a certain kind of Italian-language Swiss film alive. The second is that the stories that come to me, at least for the time being, make sense when they’re set here. It’s true that this particular story isn’t specific to Ticino: it could have been set elsewhere, in the Jura region, for example. But it would have been a whole other film. The tone and flavour both came to me naturally in Ticino, helped by the fact that the novel it’s based on is set here.