Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis

Il Solengo, Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis (2015)

Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis are Italian documentary filmmakers.  Their 2013 short documentary Belva Nera, shot in the same region of Italy as Il Solengo, premiered at Festa do Cinema Italiano, Rome, and Cinéma du Réel where it won a Special Mention for Best Short Film.

In an exclusive interview with Filmatique, Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis discuss the inconsistency of narrative, aesthetics of absence, the state of Italian cinema and their next project.

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FILMATIQUE:  Il Solengo focuses on the life of Mario de Marcella, a solitary man living outside of society about whom many stories are told, but little very is known for certain.  How did you encounter this man, and what inspired you to tell his story?

ALESSIO RIGO DE RIGHI & MATTEO ZOPPIS:  The story of Solengo was told to us during a lunch break while were shooting our previous documentary, Belva Nera.  Our hunter friends recalled the life of the hermit Mario, his tragic past, and some special episodes that he personally lived or talked about.  We were struck by the narrative potential that his story had to offer— the hunters opened our eyes to the contradictions of oral narratives, as well as the charms of an Italian rural world that resists modernity to the extent that it's as though modernity did not exist.  

With Solengo we tried to recreate the sensations we experienced during that lunch, and played with the form of the documentary itself in order to stage the impossibility of enclosing one's life in a movie.

Il Solengo, Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis (2015)

FLMTQ:  Some of the film's more comical moments arise from interactions between the other hunters— for example, over the usefulness of a chair.  What motivated you to depict this 'other side' of Italian culture: the authentic world of men living off the land, in the wilderness?  What do you believe this life has to offer— petty arguments, quotidian details, walks through the forest— that mainstream cinema does not?  Why is it important?

ARDR & MZ:  We felt that these older people had something to offer, so we listened to them and let them build the story with their own words: listening to them almost gives you the same emotion of reading a fairy tale.  In making our film, we didn't take into account the distance between mainstream cinema and auteur cinema— we work with total freedom, letting people and places take the center of the scene.  We were guided by our instinct, while orchestrating the stories of our characters in order to build a myth around the life of Mario the Solengo.  But the real world is, inevitably, contaminated by our imagination.

FLMTQ:  Filmed interviews in their shared hunting lodge reveal that these men are also singularly obsessed with Solengo's origins, his history, his life.  Disparities arising between these ever-evolving and conflicting stories qualify Il Solengo as a meditation on the nature of storytelling itself.  How do you believe cinema can act as a tool for us to challenge our preconceptions, our idea of truth?

ARDR & MZ:  The intent was to build a film in which words shape the images and not the other way around.  Starting from this assumption, Mario's character is built through memories, often contradictory, about his life.  

We didn't want to make an investigative documentary.  We wanted the different portraits of the character to strike the spectator in a manner that he would leave with the feeling of not having come to an absolute truth.  We were not interested in locking Solengo's character into a single story, but rather to transcend the story itself by revealing a story's full potential.

Il Solengo, Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis (2015)

FLMTQ:  More than anything Il Solengo is informed by absence— the absence of women, the absence of its titular character amid circular and swarming conjectures regarding his life, and, at its conclusion, the most profound absence of all: death.  Can you comment on your ideas of the aesthetics of absence, and how you sought to structure absence into the fabric of the film?

ARDR & MZ:  An essential part of the mystery around Mario's character arises from his absence.  His wild and savage nature removed him so far from his community that few can be said to have actually spoken with him— and even if a person remembers his actions, for the most part they were misunderstood, misrepresented, or simply took on a different shape with time.

When we first heard Mario's story the hunters all talked about him in the past tense, leaving unclear whether or not he was alive.  Translating this idea formally in the film meant that his image comes into shape through voices and places.  The rock where he lived, the river and the countryside represent an important narrative elements in the film.  They underline il Solengo's absence but at the same time substitute him.

We did the same to underline the importance of the two women— Solengo's mother Marcella, a very strong and much discussed woman, and the love of Solengo's life, Eugenia, who was poisoned by an adder snake and died.

And to the question, 'why this life?,' his own words mystify the truth.  Love cannot last— it is crushed by this arduous land.

FLMTQ:  One of the hunters remarks, at a certain point, that Il Solengo "would not talk to anyone nor care about the others.  He just wanted his life and nothing more."  Do you believe it possible for people to live outside of society?

ARDR & MZ:  It's definitely possible to live outside society and Mario's life, like that of many others, is proof of it.  

With this film, however, we did not want to focus only on that aspect.  We wanted to portray the complexity of a difficult life taken to its logical extreme.  Mario's life and his circumstances captured our imagination and we tried to reconstruct it narratively without drawing any conclusions.  Mario's silences are often more powerful than anything he could have said.

FLMTQ:  During last year's Venice Film Festival, Alberto Barbera bemoaned the lack of young filmmaking talent in Italy.  Do you believe Italian cinema is in a rut?  If so, what do you believe to be the cause— cultural forces, institutional practices, lack of resources, or otherwise?  If not, how would you compare today's cinema in Italy to that of past generations?

ARDR & MZ:  There are many talented young filmmakers in Italy that need to overcome a heavy hand lurking above them in terms of competition with more established filmmakers, like everywhere else.  A complicated national funding system doesn't help, nor do old producers that are reluctant to invest in new talents, and certainly not cinema practitioners that don't like to take on movies with unconventional themes or at least those that are not considered safe.  And today, the taste of the public which is slaughtered by television and cinema without any true direction, has only room for improvement.

FLMTQ:  Are you working on any new projects, and if so, can you tell us a bit about them?

ARDR & MZ:  It's called King Crab.  It is a story of migration, the evolution of a tale in a film that moves across the world and is transformed into legend.  The film is the story of Luciano, who at the end of the 1800's in the village of Vejano, in Lazio, drunk and riotous, commits one crime too many and is exiled by the community.  He ends up in Patagonia where he becomes an adventurer in search of his destiny.  A film inspired by a true story, for which we have in mind a co-production between Italy and Argentina.

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Interview by Ursula Grisham

Head Curator, Filmatique