During a conversation in Locarno, Luca Guadagnino reached for an image that seemed to contain both his pessimism about the film business and his reason for producing Giovanni Tortorici.
The Italian industry, Guadagnino argued, has become a desert. Yet even there, a rare flower can push through, a filmmaker with the stamina to form a cinematic vocabulary and the nerve to resist the language already prepared for him. “It’s very important to protect those roses,” he said.
Tortorici, sitting beside him, is the rose Guadagnino had in mind. Ketticè, the writer-director’s second feature after Diciannove, premiered at the 79th edition of Locarno Film Festival. Set in Palermo in 2012, the film follows Giulio, a dissatisfied 16-year-old who drifts away from school and toward friends, weed and Ketty, a more self-assured girl who appears to offer another way of being. The film’s local coordinates are exact, but the discussion repeatedly returned to what those details disclose about youth far beyond Sicily.
Giulio is almost never without people, yet solitude defines him. Asked whether loneliness among young people has changed since 2012, Tortorici resisted a neat generational diagnosis. “I don’t think it has changed a lot, honestly,” he said. During casting, he met thousands of young people and found the same volatile combination, a desire to be free, a susceptibility to forces they do not control and a public language of concern that can be more mediated than lived.
Young people may now speak more visibly about the environment or gender, he observed, but those currents have also produced a reactionary counterforce. For Tortorici, the contradiction matters more than any reassuring story about progress.
Nor does he see Palermo as an isolated case. “I don’t see much difference between a kid from Palermo, a kid from Rome, a kid from Milan and a kid from Paris,” he said. The decisive pressure is less regional than structural, a Western society whose violence and oppression are distributed through class.
Giovanni Tortorici
Guadagnino approached the same question from the other side. Universality, in his view, is not created by sanding away the particular. It emerges when a film commits to its own world strongly enough to pose a question that any audience can answer.
“I don’t think that the place, the setting and the world that Giovanni wanted to build shrink the perspective of the movie,” he said. “They actually enlarge it.” The place, the setting and the world that Giovanni wanted to build do not shrink the perspective of the movie. They actually enlarge it,” says Guadagnino.
That principle also defines Guadagnino’s understanding of production. The producer, he said, is “at the service of the movie,” responsible for finding the means that allow it to become the best version of itself.
His most thrilling moment is consequently not managerial but spectatorial, sitting down, watching the finished work and discovering whether it speaks. With Ketticè, he said, it did, in “a very universal way.”
Tortorici pointed to Giulio’s confrontation with a teacher. The boy says he does not study because he does not want to become like him. Beneath that refusal, the director sees an intuitive recognition that education, as Giulio encounters it, demands submission to the adult world whose power he already suffers. Friends promise a temporary release, weed becomes “a means to freedom.” Tortorici does not mistake that route for safety, but neither does he treat the adolescent as the principal culprit.
“I wanted to describe the ignorance of an adolescent without saying that they are guilty,” he explained. “I think the guilty ones are the adults.”
Giulio inhabits what Tortorici called an ultra-capitalist, media-saturated context, one whose Italian form has been especially disastrous. His aim is not to excuse the character’s choices but to relocate responsibility, away from a teenager who cannot yet name the forces acting upon him and toward the social order that has taught him to experience discipline as domination.
That also clarifies the title. Although Giulio is the protagonist, Ketticè takes its name from the figure who concentrates his desire. Ketty comes from another social class and is constrained in her own ways, but in Giulio’s imagination she becomes “a symbol of freedom”.
Ketticè’s sudden slow motion and split screens are not ornaments laid over an otherwise naturalistic coming-of-age story. Tortorici described them as necessities. He grew up attentive to filmmakers for whom style was itself a form of thought, Jean-Luc Godard, Sam Peckinpah, Brian De Palma and Hong Kong cinema. “The semiotic meaning of a shot or a certain type of editing is fundamental,” he said. Form gives him a way to express concepts and even “metaphysical stuff” that dialogue alone cannot carry.
The freedom is partly autobiographical. Both Diciannove and Ketticè are personal films, and that proximity allowed him to use a subjective vocabulary without apology. A story farther from his own experience, he suggested, might call for a more modest approach.
His next project may test that proposition, encounters made while shooting in Palermo have led him toward people from more difficult neighborhoods and life experiences, while preserving his interest in the family as society’s first mechanism of formation.
“The family is the structure that forms the next repressed and homologated person of the future,” he said. “Family, in particular, is super important for me.”
His lineage is not limited to canonical art cinema. Tortorici spoke with particular affection about poliziotteschi, 1970s Italian horror, Mario Bava and Fernando Di Leo. Their low budgets did not prevent audacious images, they made freedom possible. He admires the uncompromised energy with which those filmmakers staged spectacle and found poetry in movements of the camera that supposedly more important films could not match.
Guadagnino met Tortorici around seven years ago, when the younger filmmaker worked as an assistant director trainee on the series We Are Who We Are. Tortorici was bold enough to put his writing in front of him. That mattered because Guadagnino has a precise suspicion of screenplays, too many are formatted so efficiently that the reader already knows the movie they will produce.
“The script should be a beautiful text that promises a great movie,” he said, “not the movie.”
Tortorici’s pages held something less predetermined, “intelligence and life.” Guadagnino kept reading, shorts, medium-length work and eventually Diciannove, the unruly debut he helped bring to the screen with his producing partners. What he looks for as a producer is not an extension of his own directing identity. “I want someone who is the opposite of me,” he said. He also rejected the suggestion that the two filmmakers might be linked by cynicism. Ketticè, for him, is charged instead with generosity, joy and “this feeling of life.”
From there, the discussion widened into Guadagnino’s diagnosis of Italian cinema. From the silent period through the 1970s, he said, the country produced major personalities within an unusually fertile industrial ecology, auteurs and bourgeois cinema, B movies and international productions shot in Italy. The value of that system was the coexistence of forms, ambitions and scales.
The arrival of private television and Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire, in Guadagnino’s account, dried up that ecology. Cinema began to resemble television, genre filmmaking was diminished, financing narrowed into fewer hands.
At the same time, authorship was reduced to a claim of ownership over a story, write the screenplay, film it and call yourself an auteur. What disappeared was the harder practice of authorship, the humble, consistent construction of a vocabulary. „Cinema is language. When you forget that, you start making audiovisual filmed screenplays,” notes Guadagnino.
For Guadagnino, that confusion is a “serious defeat.” It produces filmed screenplays or imitations of a generic international idiom, a little American, a little French, nowhere fully alive. Nor does he believe the problem belongs only to Italy; many national industries have undergone the same contraction of possibility. His assessment of the old system’s chances is unsentimental. “I would not go further to say there is hope for the industry,” he said.
The future, then, cannot mean restoring a vanished structure. It means creating conditions in the present for the work that might change what follows. In Tortorici’s first two features, Guadagnino sees the beginnings of a profound vocabulary, and therefore a rarity worth defending. Producing becomes an act of clearing space around that rarity, making sure “every stone is not left unturned” in giving a filmmaker the means to express himself.
When the discussion turned to whether filmmakers must leave Italy in order to survive, Guadagnino refused the premise. “To go outside Italy would be even more provincial,” he said. He invoked Franco Piavoli, whose radically personal cinema remained rooted in the small territory around his home near Lake Garda. Geographic reach is not the measure of cinematic imagination.
What matters is “the mindset”, what a filmmaker wants to say, how reality is interpreted and how falseness is refused. Ketticè, Guadagnino said, is “intoxicating” because of its truth and vivid reality, a film so embedded in its own place and consciousness that it escapes provincialism without leaving home.
Even if particular filmmakers could resist, what about the general mindset surrounding them? Guadagnino’s answer was as concise as his diagnosis had been expansive. “We shouldn’t care about it.”
Image courtesy of Locarno Film Festival/Ti-Press.