Synopsis
A night journey running on the parallel tracks of four young adults’ lives, set against the backdrop of a deteriorating Rome, as much as their certainties. A fragmented tale, woven from shallow relationships, where romance and brutality, sweetness and suffering, music and silence alternate.
A girl rich in artistic talents finds herself working as a flight attendant; a taciturn aspiring actor roams on his motorcycle in search of casual sex; a couple of musician lovers find themselves working under the table in a restaurant kitchen. They do not know each other, yet they all experience the same situation: the path they had chosen has led them to a dead end, and they find themselves on the threshold of their thirties with no prospects. Their youthful ambitions have collided with the reality of the contemporary world. They live in a deep and constant discomfort, in dissatisfaction, without fully understanding the reason for their malaise, thus risking total inaction or random aggression. It is only habit, like that of stopping at the late-night sandwich shop, that sweetens the poison. During a succession of endless nights, the protagonists will try to confront their own vulnerabilities, besieged by constant existential insecurity. The mantra to grow and move forward is only one: believe in it. You have to believe, yes… but in what?
DIRECTOR’S NOTES
With this film, I wanted to explore the discomfort and frustration experienced by today’s young people in the contemporary Western world, conveying their sensations and fears. I wanted the audience to be able to feel and see this “liquid society” described by Zygmunt Bauman. This led me to make extreme choices, such as using raw and dirty photography, achieved by pulling the film and forcing development.
I felt an uncontrollable need to emancipate the creative process from classical schemes. I couldn’t and didn’t want to in any way limit the path of these characters within a solid and granitic narrative model, with the concrete risk of giving rise to artificial and anachronistic rhetoric. On the contrary, I decided to embark on an uncharted course, relying more on sensation than on the ‘literary text’. I tried to follow the paths traced by independent directors of the past like Rossellini in Italy, Cassavetes in America, or Wong Kar Wai in Hong Kong, assimilating the teachings of artistic productivity and trying to outline my own personal perspective in staging this “metropolitan poetry”.
The shooting lasted 13 nights, spread over 8 months. During this period, I tried to lead the actors, the musician, and all the collaborators towards this perspective, precisely detached from traditional styles.
The creative process was also unique. While writing scenes, we also worked on location scouting, composed music, and built characters starting from the actors. And so, slowly, the aesthetic dimension also took shape.
It is a film that thrives on contrasts, and through musical dissonances and alternate editing, it seeks to convey the unpredictability of life and the present.
Music, in fact, is not a mere sound commentary but the true pivot of the narrative structure. The scenes were written and filmed without a pre-established order, just as they came to mind. What I have created is a puzzle of formless fragments, but only apparently, because this is precisely a story of lost dreams, in which the characters are going nowhere, ending up turning on themselves, overwhelmed by melancholy and the intoxication of life.
PRODUCTION NOTES
When Alessandro Marzullo proposed the film to us, we thought it was a challenge bordering on madness, both from a production and an artistic point of view. After all, it was about making a debut work in a very short time, on a reduced budget, and mostly on film. But perhaps for this very reason, we immediately understood that it was exactly the project we were looking for. We at Daitona, in collaboration with the associated producers, strongly wanted to support a project that was out of the ordinary and with a certain artistic relevance. We did this because the theme and what the film wants to communicate represent for us, as for the director, something urgent that must necessarily be shared and spread. Speaking about the social and existential problems of young people living in the world today, in the way Marzullo does with “Unbelievers”, is, in our opinion, something truly unique. The film is an editing work that brings together and defines in its final form two short films “When the Sky is Dark” and “When the Sky is Dark – Part II”.
“Unbelievers” is an experimental project from all points of view. First of all, from a production point of view: if the classic production process is linear and sequential (Writing, production, post-production), “Unbelievers” is a project designed from the outset in simultaneous and communicating phases. In other words, during the writing process, production was active in searching for locations, actors, and financing, and in almost all its other functions. In this way, writing served as a guide to production and vice versa. The filming phase was extended over time even though the film was shot in 13 days overall. All this was possible thanks to the strong synergy that was established among all production members and the director. As producers, for the type of film that Alessandro wanted to make, film seemed to us from the outset the only possible expressive form. We wanted to obtain images as organic, alive, and dirty as possible, maintaining all the raw characteristics produced by the development of the negatives. For this reason, in post-production, we worked a lot on the “noise”. The director and the director of photography even decided to pull the film a few stops during the shooting phase to increase it. Music also plays a fundamental role in the film. Riccardo Amorese, the author of the original music, composed the songs together with the director before the start of production and simultaneously with the screenplay phase, thus integrating the film writing with the musical one. This allowed the musical element to influence the narrative as well, almost giving voice to the characters.
The film will be premiered June 23 at Pesaro Film Festival 2023
https://www.pesarofilmfest.it/en/program/1453-non-credo-in-niente
Official Film Website: https://noncredoinniente.com/
