Director and screenwriter Christian Filippi presented his debut feature film at Sentieri Selvaggi My birthday, along with co-star Giulia Galassi. Built in 2023 thanks to the low budget Biennale College Cinema program at the Venice Film Festival, the film was presented at the 81st edition of the exhibition and won three awards at Alice in the City in 2024, including the one for the best young interpreter to the protagonist Zackary Delmas.
Before the meeting the short film was projected, always directed by Filippi in 2021, The keeper and the ghost, who with my birthday has in common low-budget processing and poor availability of means. The idea was born in 2018, after the closure of several reception centres throughout Italy: “I was at a protest event, and once I ended up talking to two custodians of a cemetery: They told me that, after the center closed, one night they found a couple of boys who were going over the gate to sleep in the cemetery. When I write something, I always try to start with the paradoxes that hit me, and going to live in a place of death seemed like an absurd paradox. And to have to tell quickly, because it was a very hot topic at that time. We turned in two half days, and it was an experience that made me understand how to create a language that fits the productive problems that were there at that time.”.
The director then explains the choice of format 4:3, which also comes back in My birthday: “I really liked the possibility of working on the escape lines, on the verticality of the location, the cemetery of Prima Porta. And then surely there were also some productive aspects, because it is true that almost everything is shot in the outside, but for those few scenes in the interior we did not have the possibility to have so much scenography. By cutting a portion of the frame, the 4:3 gives you the opportunity to make the film feel less “poverty” and focus on acting, cast. You can go to the essence of the story, that is, the feelings, which are then expressed by actors and actresses.”.
Speaking of interpreters, Giulia Galassi intervenes on the preparation work carried out for My birthday together with the rest of the cast: “Despite the micro-budget we had a way to work a lot on characters and history. Christian claimed to have weeks of trial with us, so we arrived on the set already ready, which is a very rare thing in Italian cinema, especially because times and money are few. We did some tests improvising much and without knowing in particular what would be the machine movements or the frames, and having been able to work so much on the characters and their relationships allowed us to stay very free and quiet on the set and to work on all the small technical things”.
Filippi then deepens the productive road of his work before: “In 2015 I had just finished doing an assistant on another film, where they sent me to do castings in family homes and child detention institutions. After that experience, I had been in touch with some associations that managed these family homes and I started proposing cinema courses. But then over time I felt the need, especially for those who work in these environments, to be told. It was a bit like an exchange: I and the screenwriter Anita Otto started collecting stories, the most different possible, and then we decided to put in some fantasy characters.”.
Afterwards, the contribution of the Biennale College Cinema: “It’s a program that from the first workshops gives you tools to work in subtraction on history, understand why you’re telling it. We arrived with a screenplay in which there were sixty locations and went out with a screenplay where there were perhaps ten, finding in this way the soul of the film, which before maybe was taken from other, from technicalisms or from fixtures. The important thing I think of Biennale College is the exchange of views both with tutors but especially with colleagues, because you work with so many people from all over the world, and all are at their first or second films. Having a constant exchange and an international eye on the film is an opportunity to make that universal story.”.
From these experiences the GIRARE CON MICROBUDGET course, which Christian Filippi will hold at the Scuola di Cinema Sentieri Selvaggi live Zoom from 17 February to 10 March.
Article My birthday – The meeting with Christian Filippi and Giulia Galassi comes from SentieriSelvaggi.
