Italian director Nicolò Bassetti decided to make his documentary Into My Name, which world premiered in the Berlinale Panorama, after speaking to his own son. The film explores the lives of four young friends as they deal with gender transition. It was executive produced by Elliot Page, the Oscar-nominated Canadian actor who came out as transgender in 2020.
“The idea came to me in the middle of the night three years ago after I received brave words from my son,” Bassetti says. His son’s words about gender transitioning made him “laugh and cry.”
“In truth, I think he was showing me a possible path. He wanted me not to be fearful, to trust him and to stay close to him, to follow him to a different way of looking at the world.”
Bassetti may be a middle-aged man but he was quickly able to win the trust of his young protagonists.
“The secret for me to get close to them was to move very slowly. I made a conscious decision never to ask them to do anything but merely to observe – basically to take myself out of the equation,” the director describes his approach. He shot relatively little footage. He told his subjects that he was determined to see “the beauty beyond gender rules.” He wasn’t trying to become embroiled in bitter debates about gender politics. He would leave TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist) wars to others.
“Staying out of these discussions was very difficult but what really helped me to keep above the fray were the boys and my son. They helped me incredibly…when what you are looking for is beauty, it makes it easier to stay above these vicious discussions,” he says.
The World Health Education now that states that gender as a social construct “varies from society to society and can change over time. Gender is hierarchical and produces inequalities that intersect with other social and economic inequalities. Gender-based discrimination intersects with other factors of discrimination, such as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability, age, geographic location, gender identity and sexual orientation, among others.”
In other words, characters like the ones whose lives are depicted in his film face enormous hostility and misunderstanding. This can be seriously detrimental to their mental health. That is the bottom line.
In Into My Name, Bassetti was drawing on some unlikely inspirations. “In the many months I was hanging out with this group, preparing the shoot, they actually came up with the two books that became the literary reference for the film, namely ‘Peter Pan’ and ‘The Four Musketeers.’ In a strange way, those two books were the guideline to the structure of my film.”
The four main protagonists of the documentary all looked to these books.
“The guys seemed to me really [to be] four Peter Pans,” the director says. Bologna, one of Italy’s most open-minded and tolerant cities, was their equivalent to Kensington Gardens in the JM Barrie classic. “It’s a welcoming and comforting city where they have found a refuge.” The musketeers, meanwhile, provided the motto: all for one and one for all. “It fit them perfectly throughout the filming. I called them musketeers all the time…”
Throughout filming, Bassetti kept his son very close to him. “Matteo was always by my side. In many ways, he was my mentor in this particular situation. I always ran anything by him, any ideas I had…sometimes these were heated discussions. We didn’t always see eye to eye but we were very close through the entire [shooting] period.” The director sees the film as a “synthesis” between his vision and that of his son.
International sales for the film are handled by Cinephil.
