Nerissa

We all have a Nerissa, especially in times of uncertainty...

What is real? What isn't?

Our minds drown in an ocean of information and external stimuli. Politicians threaten the now utopic dream of stability and harmony with disruptive politics of hatred.

Day after day, it is more and more difficult to find our own point of view on things, our own personality and identity. We live in the era of indifference and anonymity. We are children of a centuries of senseless wars, our cities got destroyed, our relatives got killed. With no home, no destination, we are just wanderers among the ruins of a bloodstained past.

We all have a Nerissa, especially in a world permeated by a fundamental impossibility of understanding each other, due to the progressive disappearance of important values such as listening. As the famous italian poet Luigi Pirandello once wrote in "Six Characters in Search of an Author", "We all have a world of things inside ourselves and each one of us has his own private world. How can we understand each other if the words I use have the sense and the value that I expect them to have, but whoever is listening to me inevitably thinks that those same words have a different sense and value, because of the private world he has inside himself, too.” From this reflection, we can understand that the natural result of this difficulty in communicating is an existential solitude, which we tirelessly try to conceal surrounding ourselves with empty objects and reassuring noises.

We all have a Nerissa, especially those people who are more inclined to surrender to that loneliness. Dylan, the protagonist of our story, is one of them. Emblem of the modern man, lost and without a purpose. He always looks for beauty, but he cannot see it anywhere. Reality appears to him as a ghost, something which he is not able to grasp, to understand completely. The cause of his depression is the symbolic death of his ideal of love, which he is not able to accept. He seeks solace, shelter, a glimmer of safety. When he understands that the outer world doesn't allow that deep level of listening and communication, he migrates to a remote beach, like a modern Ulysses, and blindly surrenders to Her, the poison of solitude and isolation. Nerissa gives him a newfound hope, but can a creature of the subconscious be blindly trusted?

This film is dedicated to all those people who are looking for a glimmer of beauty in their lives without succeeding. It's dedicated to those frail people who easily lose themselves in the sea of uncertainties without being able to find their way back to the shore.
We all have our own Nerissa, that dream, that ideal that we really want to believe in, but that we're not able to fully grasp, maybe because of trauma or because we are deciving and sabotaging ourselves.
Living for too long in the world of our own expectations can often make our eyes no longer used to reality. We cage ourselves in the prison of our own mind. That is what Dylan does in the film: he is tempted by the charm of Nerissa until he can't escape her anymore.

With this film, I was hoping to show the "wound" in order to heal it. This film has been a cathartic process for me and I hope from the bottom of my heart that it can be of some use for other people out there in search of a purpose.