The blue hours

I began writing this story thinking about waiting. Not grief, which has a shape and a ritual, but the crueller condition that comes before it: not knowing. When the phone goes unanswered but you might still hear it ring tomorrow. Bruno lives in that suspension, and I realised I wanted to inhabit it with him, without trying to leave it before the time was right.

The blue hour is that moment between the end of night and the beginning of day when the light has not yet decided what to be. It is the moment when a shadow can look like someone you love. I built the film around that trick of perception, because it seemed the most honest metaphor for what pain does when it has no definitive shape: it makes you see what you need to see.

War is off screen because it is always off screen, for those who stay behind. It arrives as the sound of a television, a message on a phone, the silence of an unanswered call. I wanted the audience to feel it exactly that way, the way Bruno feels it, the way the families of those who have left feel it. I did not want to make a film about war. I wanted to make a film about what war leaves behind.

The young man who arrives at the house has no name by choice. It is not a narrative device: it is the necessary condition for Bruno to be able to take him in. Giving him a name would have meant seeing him as a stranger, and Bruno has no room for a stranger, only for a shadow onto which he can project his son's absence. The shelter he offers is an act of misdirected love, and in this, in its imperfection, in its partial blindness, it seems to me more true than any heroic gesture.

I chose Federico Vanni, known also for his performance in "Dostoevskij" by the D'Innocenzo Brothers, because he can do something rare: fill silence without breaking it. Bruno is not a character who explains, confesses, or falls apart. He holds everything inside, and what surfaces does so through gesture: the way he feeds a log into the stove, the way he grips his phone, the way he holds his breath when he sees the young man cross the bridge. I needed an actor I believed capable of making the audience feel the weight of weeks of waiting in a single glance. With Federico, that trust was never a risk.

The landscape is never decorative in this film. Nature here is a place of survival, not consolation. It reflects the hardness of the characters' lives without commenting on it. I have always distrusted landscapes that place themselves at the service of emotion. I prefer those that resist it, that force the characters to earn every step.

The final image, the young man on Pavel's motorbike and Bruno watching him, is the only moment in which I allowed myself something that resembles hope. It is not a resolution: Pavel is still missing, the young man will leave, the waiting goes on. But for an instant Bruno sees what he needs to see, and I did not want to take that instant from him. I did not want to take it from the audience either.