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Futuro Antico. Interview with Simone Bozzelli
Feb 6, 2024
Ludovico Pratesi
The young director Simone Bozzelli, fresh from the success of his debut film Patagonia, believes that it is important to remain amateurs in life. In a world where the only belief is in the body.
What are your inspirational references in art?
I often wonder where my gaze rests on things. In art, I believe the question of sight is central. However, the true nature of the screen, of a frame, is not so much to delimit the image as it is to hide what surrounds it. What is being observed, then, also tells a story about what is not observed. The result is a doubt that is more powerful than any truth. I am inspired by all the authors who have framed the bodies of doubt in relationships, like R.W. Fassbinder or Marco Ferreri. Their works are not about persuasion but about disorientation.
What project represents you the most? Can you tell us about its genesis?
I can confidently say my first film, Patagonia, also because, for now, it’s the only one.
Patagonia, in addition to telling a fragment of my life, was a work that intertwined writing, encounters, and an emotional journey beyond the twenty-four frames per second. The initial idea, born with screenwriter Tommaso Favagrossa, was to create a detailed and anguished transcription of an unequal and hopeless relationship. The trauma of the relationship, of love as a form of imprisonment, of perpetual emotional and verbal abuse in the name of mutual need. We asked ourselves: why does the human being (often) seek suffering, chase it, hold onto it, and if oppressed by it, not try to free themselves, but almost seem to want to protect it? There is a mysterious pleasure in suffering. It is a price paid to perhaps gain something else.
What importance does Genius Loci have in your work?
Places hold great symbolic value for me. They always tell something about those who inhabit them, and this is a powerful tool for image makers. I think of the desolate landscapes in Twentynine Palms by Bruno Dumont and the arid passion that consumes the two protagonists… I think, in my own small way, of one of my early short films, Loris is Fine, which tells the story of a boy who has idealized a love that perhaps doesn’t exist. I asked the set designer for locations that would escape realism; I wanted the character to inhabit a fiction. Taking a look at where you are to understand how you feel is a good exercise.
How important is the past for imagining and building the future? Do you believe the future can have an ancient heart?
Every day is the hinge between the past and the future. In fact, I live the present with great anxiety because I perceive it as an arithmetic mean between past paths and future races. I have no memory of past pain, and therefore it teaches me little emotionally. Likewise, everything I do seems well done and beautiful only if it’s in the past.
What advice would you give to a young person wanting to follow your path?
Stay an amateur. The lover, the enthusiast works for love and pleasure without worrying about formal prospects and career. The amateur takes risks, experiments, and follows their instincts. Working in a non-professional way leads to new discoveries. In the mind of the amateur, there are many possibilities; in that of the expert, few.
In an era defined by post-truth, does the concept of the sacred still hold importance and power?
The sacred is something that, for me, relates to the unknown and faith. My faith and my unknown are bodies. It is towards a body that my gaze and curiosity naturally incline, enjoying the knowledge without ever tiring or feeling forced. Desire, at its deepest level, always relates to infinite magnitudes and thus to the sacred. But totality doesn’t exist without a minimal particular to pivot upon: a nose, a hand, or an irregular tooth can become the form and place where spiritual dimensions of devotion and desire manifest in me. And thus, of creation.
How do you envision the future?
Any answer I could give would conceal a catastrophic or consolatory hypothesis. However, I cannot think of the concept of the future without considering Giorgio Agamben’s words on the contemporary, namely, “timelessness.” The contemporary as a singular relationship with one’s time that adheres to it while simultaneously distancing itself. Neutralizing the lights that come from the era to discover its darkness. Facing this “special darkness” is certainly a key to looking at (and narrating) the near future.