The Old Man's Dream

When I was at university I read about "La Chambre Claire", an essay in which the author Roland Barthes reflects on the art of photography, investigating the relationship between image and reality. I remember that I was very fascinated by a personal stories about Barthes: after her mother's death, the French author began searching in the her photographs the "essence" of his mother, not her image.

I began to fantasize about a story on this concept and over the time the idea kept popping up regularly but it's never fully materialized.

"The Old Man's Dream" was born around June 2016 as "The Old Man's Room". I was in Rome, where I live, and I knew that within a month I would be back in Calabria, my land, an event that drives me to think about my origins and inspires me in picking up the cameras and start filming.

I didn't have a real script but a lineup of scenes to shoot, and I knew that I'd wanted to use my grandfather as the main character in a story about aging that would end with the solitary death of the protagonist surrounded by pictures of his loved ones already dead. But by the second day of shooting I was hit by a deep crisis: what was the sense of what I was doing? I really wanted to represent this story and these themes?

That day I did not get out of my house and stopped to shoot the shortmovie. I locked myself in the room, full of anxiously and discouragement: I do not "feel" what I was doing. And for me it is very important to feel a connection with what I'm telling. The next day I woke up even worse, but I had to shoot and I could not pull back. And shortly before the shooting something happened: while I walked frantically on the balcony of my house a parallel story began to draw itself in my mind. A story more personal and less driven by preconceptions from which I was initially started about the concept of oldness. I decided to graft in the original story, the figure of a dead wife who continues to live in the existence of the protagonist: I decided to enter the figure of my grandmother.

Although I do not remember my grandmother (she died when I was only 1 years old), her presence has always hovered in the house through the memories kept by those who had known and loved her.
Stories, photographs, the wedding ring of my grandfather always at his finger, they made sure that her figure still living over time.

From this base, I continued to write and direct (simultaneously) the short film totally changing it but finally managed to "feel" it.

And finished I realized that in someway the inspiration given by Barthes' reflections had unwittingly branched into the short film, finally managing to came to light.