email print share on Facebook share on Twitter share on LinkedIn share on reddit pin on Pinterest

VENICE 2013 Venice Days

La mia classe, teacher Mastandrea, between fiction and real life

by 

- Daniele Gaglianone makes a film set in night school for non-European students who want to learn Italian. Among the characters, is the director himself

La mia classe, teacher Mastandrea, between fiction and real life

You dive straight into La mia classe [+see also:
trailer
interview: Daniele Gaglianone
film profile
]
. It all starts with a mike check and the characters introduce themselves. Some are from Bangladesh, others from Ukraine, Turkey, Brazil, Iran… They are sitting behind their desks and asking what they should do. Some are emotional. Enter Valerio Mastandrea and off they go. In the beginning, you wonder what is going on. Why are cameramen included in the film? Why can you see director Daniele Gaglianone as he is giving instructions? The fact is that La mia classe is a strange thing, an unusual experiment, born as a piece of fiction. But during shooting, reality took over and the director ended up wanting to show that.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Valerio Mastandrea is an Italian professor in an evening school for non-European students. His class is made up of people of all ages from every corner of the world. He is the only actor. Everyone else plays themselves. They want to learn Italian in order to integrate Italian society and obtain a resident’s visa. Each one of them carries a part of the world into the classroom. Photos and products from their land, but also stories, revolutions, family conflicts, underpaid work and difficulty in being accepted. Every lesson revolves around a theme, which becomes a starting point for a journey through different visions. Stories of fear and courage emerge, rights and duties, homes, traditions. Italian songs and their words are studied.

But once one of the students, from the Ivory Coast, risks being kicked out of the country because of his lack of papers, the game is interrupted. What to do? Continue working on the film or throw everything to the wind? “We were about to tell the story about some of the potential outcomes for the students,” the director explained, “and then what was just a script idea became real life right then and there.”

That is where reality overlapped with fiction with the entire film crew. The film starts going between two levels: the one in which Mastandrea plays a teacher and the one in which you can see that a film is being made. “These two levels overlap to the extent that they become untraceable,” Gaglianone continued. “The aim was for the spectator to stop thinking about what he is seeing – a documentary, a fiction film, a docufiction or a backstage film – simply because none of these categories make any sense in this context.

Technical and narrative dramas are not the only elements of the film though. Happiness on set gives way to moral questions. Someone’s life is on the line. “If they send me back to my country, I will kill myself,” Issa says in his tentative Italian. La mia classe was set to be a fiction film, and becomes an opportunity to have a real, heartfelt conversation on integration in which many questions should be asked, but no response is possible. 

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

(Translated from Italian)

Did you enjoy reading this article? Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive more stories like this directly in your inbox.

Privacy Policy