Rotterdam 2016 Interview: Alessio Rigo de Righi And Matteo Zoppis Discuss Their Refreshing Take On Documentaries

Both looking like very suave Italian directors, Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis certainly made an impression on the International Film Festival Rotterdam circuit. Their latest documentary is about an enigmatic Italian misanthrope who retreats from his village society and lives somewhat remarkably in the wild woods of Tuscia, Italy. Only you almost never see him, and meet him largely through the hearsay of others, making this feature fall into a pretty fascinating space for non-fiction filmmaking.

Anyone who has seen their previous film Belva Nera will recognise a familiarly dark, mysterious world in Il Solengo, and it's definitely full of similarly kooky wonders. But those who haven't seen their previous work will still find in this film's compelling idea an interesting new glimpse at what the documentary genre has could be, and that just about puts these directors on the same page as Joshua Oppenheimer. Certainly the topic is very different from Oppenheimer's genre-pushing films about the Indonesian genocides, but you can nevertheless sense that the desire to turn cinematic experiences into something with greater depth is still present.

How did this project come about?

Matteo: It came out of our last film project, which we did about two years ago. We heard about the story of this film while we were shooting our last documentary. We were on a lunch break with the cast of that film, and we heard the story from them.

Then we started talking about this idea, and we decided that we really had to try to recreate the feelings we had during that lunch break. That's why so much of this film takes place around a table, and it's more or less exactly how we heard it.

How long did it take you to build up this kind of open rapport we the people in the film?

Alessio: We were already quite confident with them, because we had worked with them before and known them for quite a long time. So making Il Solengo was a lot easier, because we were already in that kind of close relationship with them. Though at the same time we encountered new stories and new characters, so that was very exciting too.

How common do you think figures like Mario are in Italian villages?

Matteo: I think a lot of small villages always have one person that is excluded from the rest of the group, even outside of Italy. As Alessio mentioned during the Q&A the other day - and I liked what he said - he said that to us, all the people in that village could seem as outsiders. They too pursue a kind of hermit life, because they're so far away from modernity.

What's more they choose to be live that. They don't want a cell phone, they don't want to be reached. Instead they have their own lifestyle and pace of life, which is very different to the pace of city life. Plus they're always walking everywhere. [Chuckles.] We were quite impressed by that actually, and we tried to reproduce it a lot in the film.

Your film has already won an award at the Turin Film Festival, do you think it has the potential to become quite a mainstream success in Italy?

Alessio: We certainly hope so. [Laughs.] But I do think it would be interesting if, you know, audiences got more opportunities to see this kind of film. Like if they had this opportunity all year long, and not just at festivals. We will just have to hope that that will be the case with our film.

Even at this festival, though, your film seems to have resonated well with international audiences.

Matteo: I do think there is something very universal with our film. In terms of cinema, I think it does create a very cinematic experience; but it also has quite a narrative dimension. I guess the film does have this quite Italian feel to it, and maybe people are responding to that.

At the same time, though, I imagine international audiences can very easily identify something about their own countryside communities too. I don't see why it would ever have to be something that is only limited to Italian audiences. Of course we wanted to catch that kind of specific Italian reality, but I don't think that limits the film to that.

There is something interesting about your film which almost doesn't feel Italian.

Matteo: In a way I think that is an important point, because we both live abroad now. And I, for example, also have an American mum, even if I did grow up in Italy and have an Italian dad. It was only later that I moved away, and Alessio has also moved away. In fact, he was born in the States but then lived in Italy and then moved away when he was eighteen. So okay, there is an aspect to us that does make us quite international.

But I also think that feeling comes from the fact that for us cinema is about more than just the country it comes from. We believe in this kind of direction that we would like to see cinema take. It's this direction that we like, and we believe that's something that could be made anywhere. It doesn't necessarily mean that if I make a film in Italy it has to be a super Italian movie.

Nor should that mean it's inaccessible to people who aren't from Italy. I mean, if I see a movie made in Sweden, I can still be very interested in it even if I don't live there. What matters is the questions that arise from the movie itself.

Do you think the fact you've moved away has also changed the way you can now make documentaries about Italy?

Matteo: Well, I think because we both live abroad, we do have this sort of attachment to the place we focus on in our film, and quite often we miss it. However, I do think we also see it from a distant perspective. We go there and we see things in the way we remember them, and we give them that sense of missing it.

Do you think this nostalgia ever crosses the line into idealising your subjects?

Alessio: I think we totally do in the film, but in a way that those characters do not necessarily represent themselves. Certainly not in a realistic sort of way, because they become these sorts of types of characters in the structure of the film and through their interaction with stuff like what is present in the film' mise-en-scene

Matteo: We also worked a lot on the distance they would have from the camera when we framed shots. That was one of the main points we discussed with the cinematographer Simone D'Arcangelo actually: the distance that they had to have from the camera in order for us to create this sense of being characters. We wanted it to be that they were not really themselves any more, but they were also sort of playing themselves in this kind of space. That was super important to us.

How did you manage to achieve that?

Matteo: Initially we actually started by filming the movie in a different way - at the very beginning of making the movie - but when we watched it back, we soon realised that the results were not what we were looking for. What we'd captured just seemed confusing to us and we preferred to change it so we could have the people in the film square in front of us, with steady shots. Them talking to us, basically.

So we had to construct that, because it looks like they're at the table over lunch, talking to themselves, but they're actually interacting with us, the viewers.

So is your documentary still rooted in a desire to create something that will communicate a lesson to others?

Matteo: No, I would say it is more that we are trying to make them reflect, maybe. The conclusion is for them to make.

Alessio: Rather than give a lesson, with our film we were trying to leave you thinking, to leave you with question marks. There was never meant to be much teaching.

Matteo: It was much more about not leaving a conclusion in many ways.

Alessio: Exactly, not giving a conclusion.

Matteo: Hopefully each person will see it and have their own thoughts about it and reach their own conclusions. We certainly don't want to say that it has one message or is meant to give a lesson.