The tale of a woman who desperately wants to adopt a daughter, “Vittoria” is the third feature from directing partners Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman. At the Cairo Film Festival, where the film is showing in the International Competition, Kauffman sat down with Variety.
How did you start out?
I always wanted to be a photojournalist. I worked for Al Jazeera as a one-man-band reporter. My directing partner Alessandro was a cinephile and he was in Berlin working in documentaries. We were good friends from Florence where I partly grew up. I started to get tired of TV. There were so many stories I couldn’t film because they weren’t newsworthy. We ended up both moving back to Italy because our dads were dying both at the same time. Weird coincidence.
We did a documentary “Butterfly” (2018) on Italy’s first female boxer to go to the Olympics, Irma Testa. She’s from a small town south of Naples. During “Butterfly,” we met one of the secondary characters in this town who became the subject of “Californie” (2021), which was our first narrative feature. It was a mix. But ethically, you’d never call it a documentary. It was directed, and there was a mise en scene. And again, same mechanism, we met a secondary character of that film and we got to know her personal story, and she became the protagonist of this film: “Vittoria.”
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Casey Kauffman, Gennaro Scarica, Marilena Amato and Alessandro Cassigoli
So this was your second hybrid documentary?
It’s not a hybrid doc: it’s a scripted film. The whole screenplay is written, based on the story of this one family. There’s no real life happening, or fly-on-the-wall moments. Just the real people reliving their experiences.
What happens if the real people can’t act?
We had an advantage. We’d already worked with the protagonist in the previous film, and we loved her, but her whole family had to work too. Marilena is a hairdresser and her husband Gennaro is a carpenter. This wooden cupboard in her salon had been broken for years and she’s always complaining about it. It’s in their own life: it already exists. We took her into one room, him into another, explained the scene, and shot it on our iPhones. When we looked at it, it was an immediate reaction. He worked perfectly, too. It was incredible.
How did you use the script?
Marilena and Gennaro never learned lines and they never read the script. The screenplay was more for us to figure out where the movie was going. Even the dialogues were written out. But they speak in the Neapolitan dialect. We literally can’t write in their language. Their dialect is thick.
Were there any disagreements about your interpretations? Or between them?
Some. There are creative liberties. That’s why rehearsals were so important. They could tell us their problems, and then we could evaluate. If they didn’t get what we wrote, maybe that’s just not how they saw the world in general. Then we’d back off. We would constantly adapt the screenplay based on those rehearsals.
Adoption has become a political football in Italy. Were you consciously making a political film?
I had no clue about international adoption. It was really the encounter with this woman who’s following this irrational impulse. Her father dies and she has a dream, where he brings her a little girl, and she can’t get this daughter out of her mind. She goes up against her family, institutions. She’s not the cookie cutter image of the adoption world: the couple who can’t have kids. It’s an egotistical desire that turns into this spirit of welcoming someone else. If it was fictional, and it went through all the screenwriting labs, they’d have said: you should make your protagonist more sympathetic. We debated it, but she’s a real person. You can’t turn these people into something they’re not.
How did they react when they saw the film?
They loved it. They’re just bawling. And going to the Venice Film Festival for them, this carpenter and this hair stylist in Naples, was a dream. But the film itself was a strong experience, reenacting the whole thing. In some of the more heated scenes, it felt like they were using the camera to finally say what they really wanted to say to the other person.
What next?
Another story from the town. This is about a guy who’s doing a job that takes him from France to Naples. But also I feel like this style of cinema could apply pretty well to certain situations in the Middle East. I don’t want to generalize, but I feel like certain national characteristics lend itself to this.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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