In the docuseries: Re-Making of Love, eight young people between the ages of 18 and 24, the self-named Troublemakers seek to create a new form of sex education for presentation to their peers. The process is followed by the husband and wife team of Lucio Basadonne and is one that proves to be as revelatory for them as for the film’s subjects.
“This is a documentary project which was born from my desire to start a conversation about the right of knowledge,” explains Basadonne. “The desire to see taboos for what they really are – layers of cultural and social ignorance. A different type of learning. To go beyond. With no mystery of faith. No confessionals. Where there is beauty, eroticism and love.”
The film shows how the Troublemakers set out to reinvent and openly promote a sex education free of common misconceptions, deciding to call on a number of experts as they began their adventure with a series of experiential workshops, confronting at first hand some of the core issues of our times, such as consent, gender identity, the use of one’s body, prejudice, disability.
In each episode, the group undergoes fundamental change and new light is shed on how to experience sex. The workshops become places of sharing, conflict and revelation. Four of the five series episodes were shot pre-pandemic, and a fifth, which will take this new brand of sex education beyond Italian borders, “from Norway to Romania,” as Basadonne puts it.
Will the project be controversial? “I think it will be really sad if to talk about sex education is considered controversial,” he responds. “But it could be in Italy, because here we’re not used to sex education… So we thought, who is the best that can talk about sex to teenagers – other teenagers. So this is, I think, the most beautiful thing to do. Just create a safe place.”
Basadonne acknowledges that this was a project best directed by a husband/wife team. “I think if you have to talk about sex, you need to have [balance],” he says. “I think I’m more focused on the practical stuff and she’s more on the emotional stuff. So it’s a work that we made together and [in which] we made our point of view, me as a man, and she as a female. And together as a couple, because of course talking about sexuality from every side involved us as a couple, but that’s not in the documentary, as the documentary is focused on the young adults.”
He offers further clarification: “She [Anna] was the one that decided that at one point we need someone that follows them from an emotional perspective…So she was more like a mama for the group and making sure that everything is safe and we are working in a safe place. I was more the wild one to say, okay, let’s make something more strange or let’s film something more extreme. Okay. So I think the movie is a balanced space between our two points of view.”
That said, the contribution of the Troublemakers themselves is just as important. “We gathered everything they made…so the documentary is a melting pot of stuff, some things that we created, some things that they created and some things that came from their phones.”
Re-Making of Love retains an experimental vibe, Basadonne notes. “There’s nothing scripted in the documentary part and we just followed what happened. It’s totally experimental [but] we tried to make a normal narrative through the film editing.”
The approximate budget is €569,059 of which €171,000 is in place. At MIA the filmmakers are looking for co-producers, pre-sales and distributors. Basadonne stresses that they are especially looking for an international online platform to “take it to the world.”
