“When I look at Rome, I see my mother,” declaims filmmaker Virginia Eleuteri Serpieri. In her hybrid Italian-Lithuanian doc Amor, we see her roaming the city in which, 25 years ago, her mother Teresa took her own life by jumping into the Tiber.
Boasting a free-flowing stream of imagery and thoughts, of old prints and family photographs, of truth and fantasy, the movie celebrates its international premiere in the Luminous strand of IDFA 2023.
Business Doc Europe sat down with Edoardo Fracchia, producer of Turin-bases Stefilm, to discuss the making of Eleuteri Serpieri’s debut feature and the peculiarities of such a deeply intimate and experimental project.
“The first talks about Amor began in autumn 2018,” Fracchia tells BDE. Back then, Bari hosted the IDS Academy, a Doc/it initiative which included, among other activities, a matchmaking session. On that occasion, ten filmmakers with their respective projects were looking for a producer.
“There, I met Virginia, who was one of the selected directors. We began talking about her project, Amor, and then we went on developing it together starting from January 2019,” Fracchia says. After receiving a development grant from the Piemonte Film Fund, the director began to write the script.
“We had a deal: to find a compromise between her experimental, short-orientated mode of filmmaking and my experience on working on more popular, mainstream features. [The idea was] to create an intelligible project, which could attract financing but still be ambitious, as it was supposed to be,” Fracchia adds.
After winning the prestigious Solinas Prize for Best Documentary Concept in 2019, it was all downhill. “Then I spoke to [the team of] Rai Cinema. They got interested, and they became one of our partners. Also, I got in touch with our Lithuanian co-producer, Rasa Miskinyte of Era Film. She was also compelled by the project. She boarded it and applied for the Lithuanian Film Centre funding.”
“Next, we received a MEDIA development grant, a production bursary from the Piemonte Doc Film Fund as well as further backing from the Roma Lazio Film Commission and the Ministry of Culture.”
Speaking about his co-production partners, Fracchia highlights that Stefilm has been collaborating with Lithuanian professionals for quite a while, as they share common approaches to work and a similar artistic sensibility. Past projects co-produced with Lithuania include Arunas Matelis’ cycling doc Wonderful Losers, and Nerijus Milerius and Audrius Mickevicius’s Exemplary Behaviour (for which Stefilm served as an associate producer alongside Era Film).
Filming of Amor took place in Rome over four weeks in summer 2021, followed by an additional, one-week shooting session in Vilnius in March 2022. In Lithuania, the team chose the actress set to portray – on screen only – Virginia’s mother, and completed “some studio shoots requiring CGI and rear projections.” Post-production was finalised in Turin.
Although writing has been fundamental from the film’s inception, we asked to what extent the editing room affected the film’s final structure. “I believe the most surprising thing is that 80% of what was written in her script ended up being in the final cut. Virginia has taken a clear direction [from the start]. What was hard for her was to talk about her work to other people, including myself and the DOP, as she was very much used to work alone.”
Eleuteri Serpieri graduated as a sound designer at Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Italy’s national film school. “[For this reason and] since the beginning, she stressed on how sound was the most important thing of this film. And she abided to that principle throughout. During the post-production phase, she was the one delivering the first score, and then we spent about five, six weeks to ‘hone’ it in our Turin studio. On the whole, I’d say that sound and image had perfectly equal importance within this project.”
At first, Eleuteri Serpieri didn’t consider using her own voice for narration. “It’s one of the few differences you can find between her written project and the film as it is now. In her first pitch, she wasn’t even mentioning [the fact] that Teresa was her mother. But then the project got closer to its final form, and we realised this couldn’t have been done by anyone else but her. It’s been an obvious choice.”
Her mother’s voice is provided by Laura Riccioli, who also stars as a background actress in the film. “After a few rehearsals, we were compelled,” Fracchia reveals.
The movie had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, playing out of competition. “When [fest director Alberto] Barbera saw the film at Milan’s Post-production Atelier, he only watched the first thirty minutes, and he told us he was very interested in our work. Then our film has been selected.”
Italian rights are being handled by Stefilm. The team is still looking for an international sales agent.Amor will screen at the Rome International Documentary Festival on 3 December, a brand-new non-fiction-focused fest launched in the Italian capital only one year ago. The film is slated for a release in select Italian theatres in March 2024.
