TORONTO – Having won the Venice Horizon’s Extra Strand Award this summer, a category for experimental and unconventional films, the throwback neorealist film Vittoria just announced distribution in several major territories. The film sold to France (Les Films Du Camélia), Japan (Starcat), Australia and New Zealand (Palace Films), Latin America, Portugal, English speaking Africa, Spain (Sun Distribution/Diamond Films) and Greece (Filmtrade).

The filmmakers come from unique backgrounds: one is a documentarist for ARTE in Berlin (Alessandro Cassigoli), and the other a former field journalist for Al Jazeera Television in the Middle East (Casey Kauffman). Their collaborative effort and expertise seem the perfect alchemy for a film based on true events, which casts the real-life subjects as themselves. Vittoria follows a Naples hairdresser who’s consumed with having a daughter, despite being the mother of three sons. Her decision to adopt threatens her marriage to an otherwise devoted husband, and sets her on a path that risks it all – along with her moral compass.

But it’s not a hybrid documentary, say the directors. It’s all scripted. “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”, they explained in a Variety interview. Marilena Amato and Gennaro Scarica, the stars of the film and the real-life couple didn’t work from the script’s dialogue, but instead spoke their dialect in scenes.

The directors emphasized that their actors “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”. The filming however, wasn’t without disagreements. Marilena and Gennaro had creative licence to correct misinterpretations of their story.

“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”, explained Cassigoli and Kauffman. Fans of Neorealist classics like Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves, Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City and Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione, will appreciate that Vittoria approaches the film style with its own unique twist: using non-professional actors to re-enact their own story – in a scripted format.

Vittoria was produced by Lorenzo Cioffi for Ladoc, Giorgio Giampà for Zoe Films and Nanni Moretti for Sacher Films. The film was distributed theatrically in Italy by Teodora.

(Images courtesy of Zoe Films)   

Massimo Volpe is a filmmaker and freelance writer from Toronto: he writes reviews of Italian films/content on Netflix