Production Transmedia production (Italia)
Staragara (Slovenia)
With the contribution of
Fondo Audiovisivo del FVG,
MiC – DG Cinema (tax credit),
FVG Film Commission,
Regione Lazio,
Slovenian Film Centre (Tax rebate)
Development
Biennale College Cinema
Line producer
David Cej
Producers Igor Princic
Miha Černec
Press Office, Storyfinders
Lionella Bianca Maria Fiorillo
PREMIERE: 13th of May 2023, 9.30pm Bellaria Film Festival
Selected for Biennale College 2017 - in production
Lala
2023, Length 85', Format 1.78:1 - 2K - Color
Synopsis
Lala, Samanta and Zaga are the same age, they share the same desires and dreams. They are three new Italian citizens, Italy does not recognize them because their parents were born elsewhere. Their stories take shape, and intertwine, in the three layers of a collective tale in search of citizenship for one - and many - undocumented teenagers. Lala looks in the mirror of her invisibility and crosses the fragments of her suspended identity. She crosses the story of Samantha, the non-professional actress who plays her role, and that of Zaga, the real girl who inspired this film. In a fluid state between fiction and reality, Lala embarks on a collective journey in search of the identity of a generation with denied rights. In a kaleidoscope of intersecting stories, the film becomes the manifesto of a generation, a mosaic of voices of boys and girls who are all Lala.
Directng Notes
Lala is the story of a second generation teenage migrant girl, born in Rome,
torn between the values of her family of origin and those brought to her by her
school life and her urban culture. Lala is also a young teenage mother, with
responsibilities far greater than those of the average teenager, responsibilities
for which she is not always ready and which push her sense of motherhood to
the limit. Suspended between tragic humor and minimal and precious poetry
that comes from reality, the first layer of this story is, therefore, an angry tale,
about an apparently benevolent system and unable to see its own distorted
logic. A coming of age story, in which Lala is confronted with the most classic
rite of passage - the eighteenth birthday - as a transition towards maturity and
towards the deepest questions related to motherhood, while struggling for
recognition by society - her run to get a document. Lala's story is inspired by
the life of Zaga, a very young girl I met ten years ago in a Rome camp. I had
the chance to be very close to her for a long time before she abruptly fled,
after all attempts to get her papers failed. After thinking about the best way to
tell the core of Lala';s story, the struggle to obtain papers in the country where
she was born and raised, so I decided to make it into a film inspired by reality. I
believed this was the best process to convey the truth more deep at the heart
of his story, since she was not there and disappeared without a trace. The
construction of the film is profoundly linked to the very experience of its
creation. The second documentary level reveals, in fact, the mechanism
through which the level of fiction was developed and represents the antidote
to the story itself, becoming primary and revealing all the deep and complex
truth behind the story. While we were filming and improvising around the story
during these months, we also learned ways of being together that challenged
the norm of our lives, the norm that basically makes everyone in contact only
with their immediate neighbors. This space for the challenge of the norm,
through the challenge of the relationship between fiction and reality, also
represents for the public an interlocutory space, a space for active reflection
on the relationship between what is evident and what is hidden. I started
working on the story with a group of non-professional actors, who
challenged the script, changed it, added their stories and co-created the film
space with me. Each of the people who participated in this process is was,
therefore, a necessary and irreplaceable fragment of a project whose various
layers had to coexist together to show how we found, rediscovered and
reflected on the meaning of history, constantly mirroring it in reality and
seeking more truth in acting. Ours was a collective search for truth , the
search for a shared - and therefore public - sometimes intimate, but always
deliberately collective truth.