On the occasion of the Filmmaker Festival that is taking place these days in Milan, Mauro Santini presented The endless festivals, project born in the context of the National Cinema and Images Plan for the School, which the director has curated with the Mengaroni Artistic Liceo of Pesaro, in which students and students are protagonists and can participate in a professional set, actively collaborating both at technical and creative level. It is not the first time that Santini, who usually makes his films without script, through a search for images and a documentation of daily life in the form of a diary, collaborates with the Mengaroni. It had already happened in 2023 with the beautiful summers, project that adapted The beautiful summer of Cesare Pavese creating a play of mirrors among the young narrated in the tale and the young people of high school. With The Endless Celebrations, the director collaborated with the boys to adapt the graphic novel A comic book story by Alessandro Baronciani, a comic book designer weighed that in the early 2000s he self-produced and personally sent his fanzine to every reader, hoping to find a publisher. The volume, published today by Bao Publishing is a collection of all those self-produced comics, where we talk about young stories in the background of the Marche province.
Santini, twenty-five years later, adapts to the contemporary, partially rewrites those stories, but without betraying the soul. In the film, students, on the threshold between the end of high school and the beginning of adult life, meet, love, leave, find themselves having to make the first important choices, to have to manage the first awareness of maturity. “Advancing to a text is always difficult and delicate, with the beautiful summers departed from the text of Cesare Pavese and I did not change anything, because for me it was untouchable” said the director, “How much instead I felt more free to betray, even with the shoulder of Rossano Baronciani, Alexander’s brother, although clearly it is normal that the author tends to feel betrayed. For example, I took one of the protagonists and distributed it on multiple stories because I wanted to involve more students, but I remained faithful to the total concept of the book. Another thing I have respected is the location, I went to search with the students in Pesaro, I asked them to notice the changes.”.
This film marks a decisive moment in the relationship between the director and Alessandro Baronciani: “As a young man, I did the typography chart, when Alessandro invented this particular shipping system, and so I remember that he came to me to print the fanzines and then hand bound them to ship them, now it seems to me that he closed a circle for both of them,” he told. The graphic novel, set in the early 2000s, has undergone adaptations to be more in line with the contemporary: “It was more complicated to translate this graphic novel than the beautiful summers, at a distance of only 25 years there was more difficulty, because it referred to the audiocassettes, to the compilations that were a little of the declarations of love at the time, on the home phone that sounded empty, there was already some messaging, but they were smacked by a few jokes, and then we completely eliminated the phone, and we tried to work with the boys today to understand. It was one of my most difficult films to make.”.
The director, who is also editor of the film, told in fact that he finished editing only two days before the screening: “We took a year to build, as with the beautiful summers. Even the installation was long, two days ago we twisted with two students a scene, so I ended up actually climbing just before the festival. It is the first time I work with a sort of storyboard, which I usually detest, but in this case the comic became a bit of the movie storyboard. We have verified what had changed between the comic and reality to understand how to adapt it, the captions that are in the film tell the dialogues and thoughts of the boys, and I also used the change of format, which I do not usually, to represent the change of format of the comic book“.
In the words of Santini we notice the respect and love for the students, for him the main engine for drawing up and making the film: “I liked this kaleidoscope of faces and situations, the boys moving, crying, getting lost, loving each other. I am in love with this age, I lived it in the 80s with cupness, dark, and I like to see how the boys of the world live today, I like to live with them the discovery. Natalia was supposed to be Futura right now. Several times, during the realization, I wondered if this film was too light, considering everything we are living in this historical period, even with the situation in Palestine, instead this gesture of Futura that gets his hands dirty with red painting and creates this painting with large gestures, brings the emotion of today on the screen. Futura is the only person aware of the story, in fact she is the only one who in the final scene cries, when her boyfriend tells her that she will follow her to the Academy of Fine Arts she does not want, because she knows she has to do what she needs and not follow her just because she loves her. It is the only one who knows the difficult moment, the threshold.”.
L’articolo Filmmaker Festival 2025 – Meeting with Mauro Santini proviene da SentieriSelvaggi.
