Trieste, January. I’m sitting in a café just a few steps from the Hotel Savoia, where When East Meets West—one of the most important co-production forums in Europe—is taking place. Outside, the Bora wind blows, that icy gust sweeping down from the Balkans. In front of me, a capo in B (a macchiato served in a glass) and a producer.
We’re talking about the short film I want to shoot with my daughter. I pitch it to him, and I see his eyes light up; I can feel that this film could really take shape. We exchange ideas about the narrative structure, locations, and our references, and just like that, in an instant, a new collaboration is born.
Across Italy, there are production realities doing incredible work and winning awards. It is precisely outside the usual circuits that I have found new synergies.
Even for Anno Zero, my dystopian film, a concrete possibility of collaboration has emerged with a production company in Turin. It’s a project I’ve been working on for a couple of years, which I had put on hold, but now new and promising connections have formed.
The meetings I had in Trieste are also the result of the work I’ve done over the past years. I feel that my voice as a filmmaker has matured, thanks to participation in development programs like Biennale College Cinema, Series Mania, and Torino Film Lab Extended.
Beyond attending to meet producers, I watched the pitch sessions for many strong projects. However, I also sensed that, even in auteur cinema, there’s a need to push beyond well-worn formulas. Many projects seem to be variations of familiar patterns, with a tendency in the European indie industry to favor dark, dramatic stories. A lot of these films fit that mold.
Even I sometimes find myself trapped in these narrative structures.
Attending the Forum was also an opportunity to watch a film at the Trieste Film Festival: "78 dana" by Emilija Gašić, a Serbian film presented at IFF Rotterdam 2024. It tells the story of a father drafted into the army during the NATO bombings of Serbia in 1999. His three daughters begin a video diary on Hi8 tape, waiting for his return.
Watching it, I was convinced it was a documentary built from archival footage. Only at the end did I realize it had been shot today, using a period camera. Everything was incredibly cohesive—the direction, casting, writing, and cinematography. It made me understand how experimenting with form, stepping outside familiar patterns, can be a powerful way to convey authenticity, originality, and empathy.
These films remind me why I started making cinema.
Italian cinema today is bourgeois; it mirrors the stereotype of an aging country. That’s not the kind of cinema I want to make. I seek an authentic, personal cinema—one that challenges both formal and production conventions.
Lately, I’ve gone to see high-budget films like A Complete Unknown or The Brutalist. Both left me disappointed. Instead, the projects that have truly excited me are small, experimental, unafraid to offer something unexpected. Films that aren’t afraid to challenge audiences or resist the pressure to be politically correct.
Films like "Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World" by Romanian director Radu Jude. A radical, bizarre, auteur, underground film. A mix of mockumentary, road movie, TikTok, and old Romanian cinema. A narrative that, despite its apparent fragmentation, offers a brutal and honest look at our present.
What films have recently impressed you with their boldness? And what do you think about the direction cinema is taking today?
