Memories of Villa Ada

The idea for this film started in Paris. I brought it back to Rome, where in a few days I got evicted by my 86-year-old-great-aunt, and got hosted by a guy I had met four times, who then became a very close friend, my co-writer and main actor. During our writing process I ran out of money and traveled across Italy for a week shooting ads for an ultra-luxury travel agency. With the money ready, I contacted the actors, scheduled the shoot and watched old Japanese movies. We shot for five days and the last day we finished at dawn. It was the dawn of my twentieth birthday. That evening I boarded a flight to Sicily, where, for the following two weeks, I attended a masterclass from Clarissa Cappellani, a world-renowned Director of Photography at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Italy’s national Cinema school. In the evenings I would work hours on the edit, trying to perfect it. After the end of the masterclass I spent two weeks in a small village in Abruzzo (a rural region in central Italy) in my grandparents' house, where I finished color grading and sound design. The film was done.