07/07/2023 - The Italian director spoke to us about his approach towards his second feature film, which is a religious and spiritual odyssey

We seized the opportunity to chat with the Emilia-born director Marco Righi who’s the only Italian competing in the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, via his second work Where the Wind Blows [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Marco Righi
film profile].

Cineuropa: Let’s start from the beginning. How and when did you decide to tell this story and why did you feel it was important to tell it today?
Marco Righi: To be honest, the idea for this story didn’t come like a flash of inspiration on the road to Damascus. Compared to my previous film I giorni della vendemmia, the idea for the story was [part of] a pretty slow process of pulling various elements together. There was a local news story – I come from Reggio Emilia – which I followed a few years ago and which struck me, which I won’t go into too much so as not to give anything away. I was also carrying out some research into ancient Christianity. I was interested in the faith element of man’s earthly experience. In some sense, it’s something that might be something to do with my past, because around the age of 18-20 I remember dabbling in spirituality, and no doubt this fact plays a part in my story.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Then I came across an essay by Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film. I think it was his degree thesis from 1972 at UCLA [Ed. Righi remembers it well]. This essay mainly looks at three authors, including Robert Bresson. It was quite revealing, especially in terms of the narrative structure which I tried to adapt to the film. The film is ideally divided into daily life, splitting and stasis – almost three “acts”, three moments which Schrader described pretty carefully. [..] The fact that [the story] is nonetheless “modern” was a choice made for practical reasons. There was no real reason to set it in a past time because it’s set in a small village in the Apennines and I wanted to lend the story a timeless dimension – it’s modern, but it’s also somehow detached from modernity.

What led you to pick Jacopo Olmo Antinori and Fiorenzo Mattu for their roles?
When it came to the protagonist, I had a person in mind who was like Jacopo physically and aesthetically, in other words very “imperfect”, and who best represented that dimension I described earlier, namely a remote place in the provinces. I didn’t want to focus on those “handsome” faces too much. Fiorenzo also has a striking and interesting face. Giovanni Columbu [Ed., who directed The King [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Mattu’s previous film] already knew this and gave him credit for it. [..] In my film, I want to focus more on the characters’ introspection.

The film’s dialogue and atmosphere seems to continually hover between the everyday and obviously a more philosophical, spiritual dimension. How did you strike this balance?
I did so by always trying to work with off research, so I saw a huge number of films related to spiritualist film, so to speak, and to transcendental [cinema], trying to read both film theologists and theorists … The initial quote, for example, is from Amédée Ayfre, a French abbot who was also a film theorist. He knew André Bazin and he also wrote an essay titled Problemi estetici del cinema religioso [Aesthetic issues in religious films]. I drilled down even further into this element, trying to write dialogue which sometimes had a provocative dimension, but which didn’t drift [into the banal - Ed]. I tried to work by subtraction [..] The editing resulted in a few corrections too, which helped to craft the ensemble.

In an interview published in the Italian edition of The Hollywood Reporter, producer Emanuele Caruso revealed that the film is pretty much zero budget, having cost a little less than 200,000 euros. How was it, working on such a complicated project with such low resources?
We’re in Karlovy Vary because the director Karel Och literally fell in love with the film. He wrote us an email saying that he really liked our story, its mise en scene and our discourse on “poverty”, without considering it a negative value. Then he invited us to finish the film for the competition. [..] We shot for 18 days, while the first took 14. Sometime I joke that I hope to finish the third in four weeks! [laughs] [18 days] isn’t very much; it was hard, but Covid and the weather were kind to us. We gave ourselves a lot to do: with our kind of budget, we had people who had to cover the work of entire departments all on their own.

(Translated from Italian)