Solitude On Demand

This short film was born out of my intimate need to deal with the theme of solitude.
In any city or place in the world I have found myself as an inhabitant or a visitor so far, I consistently perceived great solitude in people and things.
Despite the fact that our hectic, membership-obsessed society is doing all it can to treat our solitude as if it was a disease rather than an opportunity, solitude never ceased to exist; in fact, in this way, it is somehow “illegalised”, neglected and downgraded to a second-class state of the soul, ultimately becoming even harder to accept.
Such non-acceptance of solitude, which makes us so desperately sociable and incapable of staying alone even when we could, led me to ask myself: what would the Solitude tell us, if it could become human and speak our language?

The initial film idea was, therefore, to build a character around the Solitude.
Thus, I decided to give it a human look, a fallible personality made of certainties as well as uncertainties, including acidities and melancholies typical of who is doing a neglected profession.
When I started writing the screenplay, I knew what I would like to get at the end: a harmonic balance of irony, melancholy and satirical criticism.
The directing style that I applied is deliberately discreet. Given such a dialogue-intensive script, I believed that a baroque, aesthetically-complex directing style would make the audience’s job much harder. So, I decided to put direction entirely at the service of the screenplay, hence providing the audience with a simpler frame to interpret the content.

The production, managed by Gianfranco Boattini and myself, was carried out on zero budget (the currency after the “zero” has little influence). The crew was reduced down to the bone, with few people holding many roles – including myself, as I was simultaneously director, cinematographer and sole camera operator, in addition to co-producer and overall organiser.
After six days of external shooting overawed by wind gusts and insects that unstoppably flew around the microphones, we did the last camera roll, made a toast and went back home. Some members of the crew would be back to their everyday jobs the following morning; somebody else – including myself – would enjoy the benefits of university life (i.e. sleep till late). Tired, we came back to our routine, yet with the acquired awareness of having accomplished a little cultural enterprise. Or at least this is what they told me, perhaps to make me happy.

“Solitudine On Demand” intends to be an ironic payback by solitude.
I hope I succeeded.