By Titti Duimio
There, between right and wrong, between good and bad where the real is the most unreal of realities, there lies the story of (a) Michele in Filippo (Feel) Cavalca’s ‘Hollywood is a whole other thing’. Released with a trailer on February 2nd on Feel For Films website and YouTube channel.
Michele is an extraordinarily ordinary story, the story of many or even of all of us, that cinema has the ability to crystallize into an epic fragment beyond any possible imagination. In Cavalca’s film, nothing is what it seems, just as nothing that seems simple actually is.
“The journey into Michele's life began as a documentary – as the young but already established director from Parma tells us – however, his expressive force convinced us to create a film in which Michele was simply himself playing his outsider life because it was, indeed, an extraordinary life”.
Everything happens in Parma, a city that is a trigger and functional tool for the story, Parma that belongs to Michele, that is why it is never described but only mentioned. A city seen as a nuanced place, that surrounds the main character who lives and knows it as a daily gesture.
An extravagant man, unemployed (or perhaps too busy doing other), who wanders around the suburban bars wearing Torino football club uniform (which in his nightmares turns into Juventus’). Nevertheless, he is graduated with full marks in Economics (perhaps he knows very well the rules he disregards) and he spent his time telling episodes of his un-regulated incredible life to random people without the slightest perception of the line between good and bad, between right and wrong. Categories that belong to moral or social judgment in which Michele has no interest.
In Michele’s systematic search for dialogue, two women get in touch with him. They listen and welcome him without judgment, with the beauty and the curious intelligence of those who listen to the differences and become fundamental for the story. Just like inner voices, they give advice, one always positive other always negative, with a sort of maternal care that suggests how necessary is for Michele harmonizing Yin and Yang. Somehow mother and somehow accomplice they alter Michele’s intricate and bizarre personality, as well as ours.
Only truly special people do not hide their madness but wear it boldly, as it were their outfit, a life style, as inevitable and undeniable as a matter of fact, like a spontaneous act that states the simple and aware courage of uniqueness.
But Michele is also the story of a generation of folk that thrived in the 90s: people that lived in a supposedly everlasting glossy world, but suddenly found themselves today without reference points to rely on, with few crumpled values of nostalgia to carry in their pocket and remind them who they wanted to be.
The gaze of Filippo Cavalca (born in 1983) is sometimes welcoming towards these failures that have already occurred, other times incredulous and distant, aware that he is not guilty of them. Cavalca has a keen eye for detail, fascinated by nuances, confident but also unstable. Never a banal look. Never judgmental.
In Cavalca’s film there is an innovative cinematographic language, able to show the craziness of history and technique. There are quotes from masters like Kubrick and the Italian sexy comedy of the Seventies. A surreal mood that describes an illogical truth. An atmosphere enriched by images taken from the history of art such as the hand of Marat from the painting by Jacques-Louis David, or the dramatic light by Caravaggio that makes normality epic. The neoclassical colors complete the unconventional and visionary path of the film.
The music accompanies the work with original pieces by independent artists. The soundtrack is the work of the organist Pietro Vescovi who closes the film with a tarantella for oboe. Theme that pays homage to Pinocchio by Comencini.
Fragments of life, a continuous and poetic challenge between irony and emotional intelligence. This is Filippo Feel Cavalca’s film. It takes us out of the reassuring mediocrity and the need for normality. Beyond the border between right and wrong, between good and bad.
Between good and evil is also the next work by the Parma director ‘Pandas – Il viaggio è partito’. Film socially engaged in the fight against a recently discovered childhood disease.
Comitato italiano genitori Pans/Pandas Bge and Filippo Feel Cavalca are collaborating in making a film that aims to tell the story of Pans/Pandas, a pediatric autoimmune disease.
“To raise awareness and to discuss, these are the key words of the project, in the certainty that the topic is now beyond procrastination – we read in the presentation of the film – to make the disease known, the pain experienced by children and their families, as well as the odyssey in the search for answers and cures is the first and fundamental commitment to be promoted”.
This film will be made in co-production between Italy and the United States, the beginning of the work is scheduled for October 2022.
PANDAS is the acronym for “Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder associated with A Streptococci”, a pediatric autoimmune disease characterized by sudden onset following a recurrent streptococcal infection that causes neuropsychiatric disorders in children, discovered in 1998.
