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VENICE 2018 Sconfini

Review: The Young Fan

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- VENICE 2018: The amusing second film directed by the illustrator Gipi is a pseudo-documentary about a mystery that needs to be solved in the world of cartoonists

Review: The Young Fan
Gipi, Gero Arnone and Davide Barbafiera in The Young Fan

This is a true story. Or at least, that's what the director of The Young Fan [+see also:
trailer
interview: Gipi
film profile
]
wants you to think. Screened at Venice Film Festival in official selection in the out-of-competition Sconfini section, Gipi (Gianni Alfonso Pacinotti's pseudonym), a beloved cartoonist and illustrator from Pisa, directs his second film after his debut The Last Man on Earth [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
(in competition at Venice in 2011). Gipi has created a documentary fiction hybrid with The Young Fan – produced and sold by Fandango. An easy-going reflection on the art of entertaining through drawing.

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Typical Tuscan wit, and Pisa-based humour in particular, can sometimes boil down to mere gags, but this film is ultimately a new, atypical and entertaining experiment by a director with a personal and impulsive style that brings adventure and realism to life, and in which daily personal experiences take centre stage.

The director himself stars as the film's protagonist, and we see him in the first scene try to convince producer Domenico Procacci to finance a male Blue Is the Warmest Colour [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Abdellatif Kechiche
film profile
]
with explicit gay sex scenes. "I think it would be hugely successful in Italy’s current climate," explains Gipi. Forced to fall back on another idea, the cartoonist discovers that his colleague has just received a letter from a boy that is almost identical to one he himself received in 1997. 

How many other comic book authors have received a similar letter over the years? Gipi posts the question on Facebook and receives 50 replies. In turns out there’s a person out there pretending to be a 15-year-old boy, who has been asking cartoonists to send drawings for twenty years. A wonderful story. The problem comes with how to tell it. 

Gipi cobbles together a ramshackle team with the intention of filming a documentary, bringing a bus full of cartoonists to the home of the anonymous fan to record his or her reaction. But first he’ll need a graphologist to outline the person’s personality. And what if this anonymous fan is a dangerous maniac? Gipi leaves information about his journey into the unknown on his partner's answering machine (Chiara Palmieri).

A story that is perhaps solely a pretext for talking about the world of cartoonists, characters gifted with talent, imagination and technique. Incredibly fragile, Gipi calls them, as they are extremely sensitive to their audience's opinions. "Children forever" because all children draw, but only few continue to do so for life.

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(Translated from Italian)

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