Presented at the Giornate degli Autori in Venice 2025, A nearby thing is the first feature film by Loris G. Nese produced by Chiara Marotta for Lapazio Film with Rai Cinema. Joining documentary, animation and fiction, the film is a patchwork that digs in the memories of its author to undo the consequences of a traumatic event. The result is a film that talks about memory and memory and invites you to reappropriate your identity despite a heavy and violent legacy.
Una cosa vicina, l’intervista a Loris G. Nese
Something close in some way is an analysis, an investigation of the self. Was there a moment when you realized that your personal story was explored through the audiovisual media or was it natural for you?
L: Let’s say that it was a varied and swinging process, the first natural instinct was to review some dynamics that seemed to me to know closely within movies set on the other side of the world, i.e. when as a kid I discovered the gangster movie of New Hollywood, those of Scorsese, De Palma and Coppola, it seemed to me that somehow this story of certain social contexts would speak to me and it is to be there that I started in childhood.
This came when I started getting close to the cinema about ten years ago. I started writing this project in a more structured way to make a film by setting up archives and family stories and trying to put them in a form. A form that initially crossed the writing a bit of traditional documentary, so a treatment in which dialogues and comparisons were planned between characters but that then away showed me its limits because I felt the need to try to push the narrative even in contradictory directions between them but that together could enhance what I wanted to tell.
I obviously started from a very internal position in history but I needed to fill holes a little through the comparisons with the characters and a little through a long research started through public sources, in some cases before even my birth. So I began to explore the archives of chronicles and judicial materials by placing myself in a new position within this narrative.
The whole then gave me also the instinct and pretext to explore my identity and to do also a path of self-analysis that then was born also from the strong need to overturn the forms of narration on the Campania suburbs that I felt a little stereotyped in the period “post-Gomorra”. I tried to explore not the heroism that seemed to me strongly described at that time in portraying certain characters related to crime but I didn’t even care about the forms of narrative flattening typical of the chronicle. I’m interested in working in the folds in ambiguities and trying to figure out where the problematic hazelnut was
Do you also speak a lot of spaces, in a certain kind of context, you think cinema can also be an act of resistance to create an alternative space?
L: Yes, this film, especially at a certain point of its work, has faced a strong bending of specific place in which the story is set. To me and to Chiara who has curated the production and assembly of the film was very interested to relate this very specific, intimate and private history with the public dimension and especially with the specific territorial context of the city (Salerno, ndr) that is a city very influenced, as all, by the urbanistic trend that has crossed.
It is a city marked by the flood of 1954 that brought a shift from the historical center to the east, that of the popular neighborhoods where I grew up. So there is a split between these two areas also made by different values in conflict between them.
So I liked to start from this domestic and family microcosm and then enlarge the focal point to the whole city to the whole territory. I like to think that cinema has a very strong political role, however unequivocal the concept of consumption and product, but that it can have a political voice and a purpose. In our case we do this by trying to tell things that we know closely and focus on aspects that we find untreated and from a different point of view than the dominant narrative.
Il regista Loris G. Nese
Somehow to me personally the film has remembered another title that I love a lot like Vito and the others of Antonio Capuano, as a point of view of a child who in part suffers a context of violence but also hybridization with other languages. What is your relationship with the representation of Campania in the media? In what is it apart from tradition?
L: Already in the identification of the city, beyond this specific story that is located in the city of Salerno and therefore was set here, something I try to do with my films is to tell about the aspects of the region not so told. Even the Salerno that we staged also with all our other courts is different from the most frequent representation linked to the beauties of the Amalfi coast.
Let’s say that with One thing nearby we tried to use all the narrative styles related to the story of the outskirts bell a little by introducing also the archive materials mainly linked to the chronicle, but also the historical archives that tell the famous flood that I mentioned before, but in order to create an obvious counterpoint with the interiority of the characters. At one point it was very evident that the need to focus not only on what could be filmed when we were making the film but also to evoke unfilmable sensations, both because they belong to the past but above all because they are linked to an inner, psychological sphere.
In particular I started from my memories, from the suggestions I had as a kid when I discovered the cinema of Wes Craven and in particular the horror cinema of the late eighties and early nineties that arrived in my house through the VHS and that I consider a perfect genre to tell precisely childhood especially when spotted by difficult social contexts. A childhood full of monsters that I wanted to evoke a little by resorting to real monsters on stage, a little through the live action stage and a little more especially thanks to the animation that I think a very powerful means to give voice and body to interiority.
All this has created a short circuit of languages that relates from our point of view the complexity of what is growth in contexts like this, but that has links with the growth perhaps of anyone else within very different contexts. So also the use of gaming, the use of animation also intended as a cartoon and narrative universe that refers to childhood is something that we were interested in and that we decided to put in the film.
The film makes a very interesting speech about the violence represented by the media and that lived. Do you think that fiction as it is filtered and interpreted by who instead that violence suffers or lives near us?
L: A complex question, in my case there was as I said before a kind of accession but also a little bit of fascination with the things that everyone speaks about and that in my case I found myself on. Even the question of absorbing a story without having lived it to the bottom is a central theme of the film and I think it is a theme that then crosses the growth of those who live in problematic neighborhoods and finds themselves to absorb and collect a little bit of the pieces and to make us count. In this case, I tried to do so when I was more right and when I thought I was ready to have the situation in hand. Because the problem of the film was also to understand when it was the right time to tell this story and with which tools. And I tried to do it when certain things had been sown and I felt ready and I also had the right distance to put it in a lucid manner.
The shots you made in Salerno when you were younger, you already had a project in mind, or did you do it for your personal pleasure in taking back?
L: No, then, in a structured way for a precise movie no. For some it is precisely my short film experiments, there is one in particular that is what has the most horrific suggestions. It is precisely the first exercises of shooting and directing totally by self-taught when I was still in high school. In other cases it is a pure testimony that I had the pleasure of recording a little personal instinct, since childhood I always had a camera in the house that was that of my parents. For me it has always been a natural gesture to try to capture the present and to test it in some form. I come from a generation, I was born in 1991, in which there was still the custom to capture the present and then to concern it in the future through the supports of the magnetic tape. This thing strongly conditioned me and led me to capture a very extensive archive that then at some point came back useful and was put in the form of movies in this way.
In this film there are many different types of animation such as stop motion, but also traditional and digital. What are you feeling more affectionate and what is your creative process in creating these sequences?
L: Surely when I think about animation the most instinctive way is to think about 2D animation, the one designed and especially on paper, I still like to animate on physical support and avoid how much possible to stand in front of a screen. I always designed, before starting to tell stories through the cinema I did it with comics and for me it was a natural passage to start creating animations. In this my process is quite varied and hybrid, in the sense that I happen to write things without immediately pondering the problem of the form in which they will be realized, in some cases in the past I wrote short films that I thought I had to realize in live action that instead became animation and vice versa.
In the case of this film the work was quite varied, i.e. I initially wrote as I said before a treatment of documentary nature. When I then considered that the animation should also enter via it went structured towards a form of real script. At one point, however, I met the need to insert a stop-motion animation for a precise reason, I was interested in working on the physicality of the bodies and in this case on the physicality of the furnishings. The film creates a dialogue between the spaces from which it is characterized that are very evident spaces, very recognizable and above all very significant and I was interested to make sure that the furnishings were characterized by real characters with faces and figures of harps and make them dialogue with the genre of cinema, bring them in a direction from horror films and move them to all effects. In that case the stop-motion allowed me to do all this.
La produttrice e montatrice Chiara Marotta
La produttrice e montatrice Claudia Motta
You’ve been working together for a long time, how did you meet and what does your collaboration last over time?
C: We started working together about ten years ago and the very first short film we distributed was Those bad things, a 2018 Loris short selected then in Venice at the Critics’ Week where it was also awarded and then at the Sundance Film Festival. Let’s say that was a bit the beginning of everything. We started from Salerno with a group of trusted people who were our friends, a little by believing us, a little with the desire to experiment, in fact already the very first short is a work characterized by a strong experimentation and also by a mix of different techniques and there was born also the desire to found our own production company.
Already in those years we worked with other companies so we certainly had work with other producers but there was already this desire to become independent, to work on projects that were ours and that they could give us a particular freedom to experiment and also to reason on stories realized in the way we considered right for us. In fact, we have made short films until we arrive at A nearby thing that is the very first feature film produced and now also distributed by our company.
I must say that all these experiences have certainly led to a growth of our paths as authors but also as producers, because society has also grown together with us. It is true that from about one year we have also begun to produce works by other authors and other authors. This strong form of independence and also resistance in a certain way also characterizes a little the name of our society. We call ourselves Lapazio Film because the lapazio is a plant that is spontaneously born and resists. Born in the sidewalks, it was born in asphalt, in cement. And so this according to me characterizes very much our way of telling stories that are often stories that we know deep or that belong to the authors who tell them and with this characteristic also very decisive and this desire to experiment, therefore also to put together very different materials between them. In my opinion one thing we keep is always the narrative, that is, never losing sight of what is the story that must remain and that according to us must always be tangible.
In this film are particularly functional to narrative, what are your sources in archive search, how did you approach this practice?
C: I would always say starting from the first short because already Those bad things had a use of personal archives mixed on video with live action actors and this use of the archive is something that has characterized several works to which I collaborated to the assembly.
I very much like to know the subject with which I am involved in the assembly phase in particular so I look at it, the catalog, the set in the right way so that I can have everything in hand and can also have the possibility to adapt it to the various scenes of the script. So, for example, if I realize that at a certain time the archives I know there are can help me get to a particular emotional state and functional for that scene then I go to repeat them. And this way of working that’s a bit of a puzzle I really like.
This has also accompanied a desire to search in the unpublished archives, in recent years in fact for several works as museum installations and videoinstallations we have also begun to work with archives like AAMOD. I quoted these video installations because we searched for archives that had not yet been digitized and that therefore we digitized after we found them and used them for the first time. It’s a beautiful practice because you realize you’re using a subject that would otherwise be forgotten.
So it was also for ZO (2023) the previous short of Loris where looking we found a very nice archive of the city of Salerno of the eighties.
For One thing nearby obviously was a more important job because the archives used are a lot. I did a research in several archives, like the AAMOD, that of the Istituto Luce, and archives of Rai Teche where I sought materials that were related to the history of Salerno, both dating back to the fifties, and then the most recent archives of the eighties and the nineties. Also in that case I have to say that then we found very interesting materials and with assembly we made them communicate with each other. Often there is a combination of different archives that dialogue and that help us to reconstruct what is the identity of the city that is a character, that of public history that then mixes instead with private archives of the private history of Loris.
Is there something inspiring you? Not only do I mean directors, but also dreams, thoughts, suggestions..
C: As I said before, I really like to know the subject. I always start looking at everything many times because I really want it to be clear to me everything I have available, but then I also work so much with rhythm. The rhythm is not only musical but also a rhythm of sounds that are very important to me, so it is true that the sound of this film is made of so many pieces of sounds recorded by us, together with two sound designers.
It is essential to have a sound reconstruction of the images to give life and form to something that would otherwise be more off. And this stimulates me a lot, that is, when the images take sound for me completely change meaning. The two things go hand in hand and there is a real sound installation that tends to give a tension to the scenes, a different suggestion for the viewer and leads me on this path of assembly from the beginning to the end.
Chiara you are also a producer of something nearby, do you think there is more difficulty in Italy in financing experimental films?
C: I must say that in my opinion there is more difficulty for works that perhaps need more funds because of the times that change, as can be works with animation within them. Obviously animation requires a greater effort than people who can work or banally if people are few times they are very long, so surely there is this kind of difficulty. And perhaps there is also some difficulty due to the fact that maybe in the halls, especially in this period, less experimental works or seemingly a little more complex for the public and therefore there can be this kind of reticence. We are at a time when we want to make films that can immediately bring consent and certainly experimental works do not have a unanimous consent.
In the festivals, however, there is always luck still a space in which to move..
C: Yes absolutely, in fact we realized from the courts that there is a constellation of festivals that instead they want to discover works that otherwise would not be seen and certainly is an alternative way to the traditional distribution that I think makes much more sense. Also because we can create networks, human relations with the public.
Lately there is a lot of participation in the festivals dedicated to the archive but there is also much interest in the process of recovery and digitization. You have always worked on these materials so maybe you felt on your skin the difference in time..
C: Yes, yes, absolutely, also because in recent years there has also been a rediscovery of the medium of filming in film and therefore there is also more desire to approach the archive. There have certainly been changes on this. I think of the first festival, it was 2018, over the past eight years the panorama of festivals in Italy has changed a lot. Also on the short film has changed a lot, new festivals were born, the production itself of the courts has increased, so yes surely there is a change from this point of view.
What are your next projects?
C: Currently we have a feature of Loris fiction that is in a development phase and then there is a long of my fiction that is in development and writing and finally a short animation of a director named Nespy 5Euro in production phase and that we will end at the end of this year and from next year will begin its distribution phase. Then in parallel last year in November we started an experimental film workshop in Salerno called Memory Full, which took part in 12 filmmakers and in the end 7 short films will begin the distribution path. The laboratory is characterized in particular by experimentation and mix of techniques such as archive, animation, documentary and artificial intelligence, so they are very different from each other. It was a great edition we had a good match.
L’articolo A close thing, interview with director Loris G. Nese and producer Chiara Marotta proviene da Dituttounpop.it.
