Schiuma di Mondi, Foam of Worlds

In the beginning, three characters inhabited my mind: a mother, a daughter and the bodies of water that surround them. Until a few years ago, I rejected the idea of working with characters, until these figures appeared and I got hooked by the possibility of making an essay-film with them. From the very beginning, the mother and the child were bonded each one to a different perspective: Antonia tries to rationalise what went wrong in the process of modernisation, while Lena tries to feel part of everything that surrounds her in a materialistic-animistic way. Whilst water appears in the film through the canals, the rivers carrying sweet water to the lagoon, the rising sea, the rain drops, the mold, the little floods: from stagnant water we arrive to movement, water and people moving, in the end scene.

Alongside the parenthood and the kinships, I intended to explore the feeling of helplessness that is countered by Antonia’s growing engagement in climate justice. I often find myself despairing at how human beings fail to take preventative actions. Twelve days of the Iran war claimed 8.000 to 10.000 lives. And scientists calculated those attacks produced 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, like one year of Island emissions. Confronted with global tensions, Europe steps back on environmental agreements, while predictable heat waves increase. 

In this film, driven by her restlessness, Antonia is compelled to transform the prescriptive nature of law into a journey of setting in motion. In Schiuma di mondi, case-law becomes a membrane that connects social sensibilities and organisations thanks to a ceaseless process on a case-by-case basis. So, I chose not to step inside court buildings – often exploited rhetorically in cinema productions – and I rather focused on the legal cause preparation. 

Partly due to the great difficulties of producing this film, the shooting was scattered over several months. In that period, institutions such as the International Criminal Court struggled to enforce warrants. It suddenly became clear to me that those radiophonic news had to be part of the film, as they could well convey the clash between Antonia’s daily efforts of care and her heavy sense of impotence. In these years of conflicts and uncertainties, I believe we need to explore and to devote ourselves to a constructive dimension: even in the arts, satirical provocations are of little consequence and they don’t par up to the pain of others. We need films that can be brutal gestures of solidarity, free of rhetoric. I pin my hopes on films where thinking can help us feel and where emotions can help us think about our conditions.

The choice of the protagonists came smoothly and it was just a matter of fact: Laura Fantacuzzi (Antonia) is a talented established photographer and a dearest friend of mine who generously jumped on board in this adventure. Alea (Lena) appears in almost each film I’ve made since she was born, therefore I spontaneously asked if she wished to play. As the two main protagonists knew themselves very well, I thought our filming sessions would not have felt forced. The shooting time was really minimal compared to the time the three of us have spent together in our lives. The fictional mode helped us in choosing carefully when we wanted to play that game together and when not, enabling us to step out from the constant self-performance and self-staging pushed by society and by social media. Our shooting was a gifted time when there could be a space of playfulness, expression and freedom. Involving some children in the shooting, I intended to follow them with full openness, even when their needs were organisationally counterproductive. I intended to be true towards the microscopic gestures and moments that can hardly happen on a “stiff” organised set. The shooting was split over several months and that helped not to become too prominent on the children’s life. It’s fascinating to observe how deeply a film process is made up by the influences of each person involved in it.

This book came into the film life quite late as we included its reading in the last shooting session. I wanted to point out how the sweetness expressed throughout the entire film is not a sugarcoated emotion nor a childish one. It is an active posture. Anne Dufourmantelle’s text unites strength and subtlety in expressing how sweetness can bond us to our “dynamis” and how it may reveal power-imbalances. I hope this approach can shine through the sensorial constitution of the film imaging. We worked with low contrast and we tried to protect the continuity between outer and inner spaces, such as the lagoon atmosphere and the protagonists’ moods. Until the 16mm filmstock breaks in – wild and raw as some periods can be. A different scent of life.  

For Schiuma di mondi I felt like waiting for the editing until I had collected all I could gather. Once I surrendered to the fact the shooting had to end, the editing process unfolded very rapidly and the material matched quickly on its own. The process had grown slowly and the time was ripe: for 5 years I drafted the film in a treatment, going back and forth in between scouting, writing, filming and going back to the writing. So the editing felt like a joyful concentrated flow where I could follow the will of the audiovisual material and I was allowed for a moment to retire in a safe refuge made of rhythms and internal relationships of sounds and images.

I love the blurred space created by non-synch sound where the real and the imaginary merge, yet I needed sync sound on the dialogues not to reduce the immediacy and the emotional transport. This is how I came up working with several listening shots and also with some correspondence. I wish things could happen in a film “in between” the characters, “in between” the rooms, going beyond a plain representative dimension, innerly activating the public. I ruled out the diary form because women in the past were often confined to keeping diaries, whilst I don’t mind topics at all: I appreciate precision in some specific subjects. Poetry can be made up of concrete elements, technical details, object lists, as well as dialogues and gestures. Furthermore, in order to delve into the preparation of a legal case, it was necessary to clearly express the lawyers’ logical steps: from the idea of climate crisis victims to the possibility of collective action. 

Sometimes we composed interior and exterior spaces in continuity so that sounds would not follow spaces slavishly. The sound dimension was very helpful in conveying the child’s universe and we used toys such as a wooden music tree or a sandbox percussion to bridge the real and the imaginary dimensions. Sometimes we used hard cuts instead for rhythmic needs or for expressing a clash with reality. The form of the collage is prominent in my way of working, both for sounds and images. Even music comes in and out in this film like a collage scrap. And whenever I incorporate a musical experience into a scene, I tend to take weight off the images. For example, when Antonia lies on the sofa, Rafael Toral’s music is in charge of expressing this woman in her moment of being and in the act of thinking. In that moment, we can fully immerse ourselves in the sound experience, lending our ears to the listening of far ancient ages and far future ages that are yet to come.