Sixty-six minutes of film to shoot “Mia”

We had six 400-foot rolls, about sixty-six minutes of film in total, to shoot “Mia”.

Sixty-six minutes for three days of shooting, for a journey through country roads, mechanic workshops and the Trieste seafront, to tell the story of a father and a daughter.

It all started in Trieste, almost two years ago, when I met Andrea Magnani at When East Meets West. Back then the project was called “Sangue del mio sangue” (Blood of my blood), and along the way it changed its name. Without thinking too much about it, in the very first drafts I had named the daughter Mia. Only when the time came to choose a title did I realize what I had written: the whole film was already in that name. In Italian, mia means mine. A possessive. The very thing a father has to learn to give up.

“Mia” is a road trip, but the journey it tells is above all an inner one. It’s a father’s coming of age, more than his daughter’s: a man who at some point turns toward the back seat and realizes that the little girl he thought he knew is gone, and that if he truly wants to see her grow up, he has to learn to let her go.

That daughter, in the film, is my daughter Blu. And that father, no point beating around the bush, is me.

Whenever I talked about the project, people asked me the same question: how are you going to direct and act at the same time? To be honest, I was asking myself the same thing. In the end, the answer was to accept giving something up. For once I freed myself from the tyranny of the image, from that need to control every frame that anyone in my line of work knows well, and I focused only on what was happening in the scene: the looks, the silences, Blu.

If I was able to do that, it’s thanks to Marco De Pasquale, our director of photography. Before the shoot we spent a lot of time together building the film’s language, scene by scene, so that once on set I could trust him completely and look elsewhere. And more broadly, it’s thanks to everyone who worked on “Mia” and kept this project standing with their dedication.

The film stock did the rest. Shooting on 16mm forces you to decide in advance, to know what you’re looking for before you even turn the camera on. You shoot fewer takes, time stretches out, and the safety net that digital has made us so used to disappears. As a director, it was a great exercise in synthesis and clarity.

But the most delicate work was with Blu. The story grows out of autobiographical sparks, and that’s exactly why we didn’t want to simply film ourselves. We needed two characters, with lives of their own. And to find them, we first had to step a little away from who we are in real life, as father and daughter, and meet again somewhere else.

Now we’re heading into the edit, a phase I’m really curious about. Godard used to say that a film is made three times: you write it, you shoot it, and you edit it. With “Mia”, we’ve done the first two. The third starts now, and that’s where the film will truly decide what it wants to be.

I hope to show it to you soon.
Marco

PS: in the end we used seven rolls 😅

Behind-the-scenes photos by Luigi Mariussi