Lamberto Sanfelice
Cloro, Lamberto Sanfelice (2015)
Lamberto Sanfelice is an Italian screenwriter and film director. His short film Il Fischietto tells the story of Giulia, a ten-year-old girl coping with the loss of her parents, while his feature film debut Cloro, widely celebrated on the festival circuit after premieres at both Sundance and Berlin, also tackles the topics of hardship and female adolescence.
In an exclusive interview with Filmatique, Lamberto Sanfelice discusses the importance of atmosphere over dialogue, shooting in the snow, the state of Italian cinema and his next project.
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FILMATIQUE: Both Cloro and your short Il Fischietto feature young women on the brink of adulthood who experience situations of profound loss and despair. These are two beautiful, subjective stories. What motivated you to privilege the adolescent perspective— what about this age in particular captures your attention?
LAMBERTO SANFELICE: The protagonist of Il Fischietto is a little girl who still doesn't have all the tools needed to work out a dramatic event, such as a mourning. That's what generates her confusion. Instead, the character of Jenny in Cloro is a teenager whose life events force her into adulthood, tearing her adolescent dreams apart.
I find it fascinating to meet these girls during moments of change, when life puts in front of them choices they are forced to make.
FLMTQ: One of the fascinating things about Cloro is how fluidly the story flows without relying on too much dialogue. The emphasis on the visual over any supporting sound helps creating ambiguous characters. It is certainly a bold choice. How did you seek to structure this strong visual component when you and Elisa Amoruso wrote the script?
LS: Both through the writing process and the filming we tried to tell the story through the rarefied atmosphere of places rather than through dialogue. At the same time, we wanted a 'dogmatic' film that did not rely too much on a soundtrack, but which mostly depended on the actors' interpretations.
Cloro, Lamberto Sanfelice (2015)
FLMTQ: The editing of the film is remarkable, contributing as well to the film's fluidity. How was the process of translating your vision in the script to the editing room? How did you come to work with Andrea Maguolo?
LS: The editing of the film was quite a long process focused on finding the emotional structure of the story, rather than the narrative structure. To achieve this goal we had to make tough choices in the in the editing room and had to sacrifice many scenes.
Andrea and I have been collaborating for so many years. His contribution to the rewriting of the film in the editing room was paramount.
FLMTQ: The alpine snow-covered town where Jenny ends up is very powerful, almost a character in the film. Having come from a seaside town, this remote landscape is always perceived as hostile. What inspired you to craft your story in such a place, and how challenging it was to film there?
LS: Starting off in a seaside town to then find ourselves in a more hostile mountain landscape established a contrast. This contrast was one way to depict how the protagonist was somewhat robbed of her teenage years and unwillingly thrown into a hard and isolated landscape from which she wants to escape.
Filming in such a remote place has the advantage of letting you and the crew be isolated and focused entirely on the film, even though the weather conditions weren't the easiest. We often shot exteriors and it was very cold. Also that year it didn't snow, the snow only arrived the night before the first day of shooting and we knew it would last only a few days. We thus decided to reverse the chronological order of our filming schedule to get snow in the final part of the film. So we started shooting the second part of the movie first— not the easiest thing for the actors.
Cloro, Lamberto Sanfelice (2015)