In Pictures in Mind, Eleonora Camizzi uses the medium of cinema to confront her father, Vincenzo, who has schizophrenia, asking him the difficult questions she has avoided for years. Set in a minimalist, symbolic space, the documentary explores their strained relationship and the challenges of living with a father in a different reality.
Through their conversations, the film delves into the emotional and societal impacts of mental illness on both father and daughter. Ahead of the world premiere in the Envision competition at this year’s IDFA, Business Doc Europe asked Camizzi to unpack the making of her debut feature.
“The decision to make a film was made four and a half years ago,” Camizzi tells us. “In the beginning, it was supposed to be more of a classical documentary, with me going with the camera and spending time with my father… Soon I realised it wouldn’t have worked. I couldn’t go over my fears and ask these questions I ought, or need, to ask. So we tried some things with other DoPs who came by, but these didn’t work out either. Then I had this image in my head: my father and I in a white room, a neutral space. After a while, I realised I had to set that up. We tested it to see how we felt about it.”
That first “picture in mind” proved to be a great intuition. Camizzi booked a theatre in her Swiss hometown, Lucerne, and began filming her project. On set, other “pictures” emerged, but these weren’t simply replicated; rather, they were suggested by the props and Camizzi’s conversations with her father.
Moreover, before commencing filming, the director spoke a lot with the set director. “I wanted to ask somebody behind the camera to have a look at what was happening in front of it, while handling the communication between the teams,” she explains.
Camizzi shot about 50 hours of footage, with three cameras filming simultaneously. Shooting took three weeks spread over the course of three months in 2023. The production involved a crew of eight, including two DoPs, Savino Caruso and Kezia Zurbrügg. During this phase, editing began to check if anything was already missing along the way.
Predictably, pitching such a unique, complex project and bringing it to completion hasn’t been easy.
“Since it’s quite experimental, the hardest thing was funding it. […] It was tough to keep going and believe in it, but it’s also been easy since it was so personal and I knew I had to do it. The crew has been very supportive too, I must say.”
“It was hard dealing with my father, and I knew it’d be so. But that was part of the deal. This is the reason why I made this movie. Otherwise, it’d have been just talks with him, and who would care? But showing how hard it is to sit together and have these discussions is going to be a positive thing. I hope the audience will think the same.”
“Besides, I’m proud of my father. He’s been very brave to embark on this project. He took it seriously; he was really into it. When we first watched it together, he said: ‘Luckily I said yes to this project; it’d be a shame if this film didn’t exist.’”
How would Camizzi describe her work to someone who hasn’t seen it yet?
“It’s a film that is accessible to people who are not so much into cinema and all that. I like that it works [nonetheless], and you’ve got all these ‘meta-layers’—talking about film in the film without calling it a film, and so on… I showed it to some of my family members, and they were really touched. I don’t know how to name this, though,” she says.
Camizzi doesn’t reject calling her film a piece of auto-fiction. “The movie talks a lot about reality, but for me it’s fine to call it that way. […] It’s a term we should use more. Every film is so ‘constructed,’ even when you’re watching a very classical documentary. Someone decides what to shoot and what not to, what to include in the cut and what not. It’s the reconstruction of a part of reality.”
