Italian filmmaker Fabrizio Cattani brought “Forever With You” to the Middle East for the first time this week, with the film receiving a Green Carpet premiere at the 13th Sharjah International Film Festival for Children and Youth in the UAE. Italy is being celebrated as this year’s Country of Honor at the festival, which has put a spotlight on Italian cinema. For Cattani, the film also marks a turn toward younger audiences after previous work centered on more difficult adult subjects.
Adapted from an Italian novel of the same name, “Forever With You” follows Filo, a young boy struggling to understand the death of his mother. Set in 1998 and told through flashbacks, the film turns his journey through grief into an adventure in which the people around him represent different parts of his inner world. Cattani told Variety that Filo represents the rational part, Rullo the emotional part, the father the mature part, Amelie the childish part and Guelpho the scary part, adding that all of these parts exist inside people and that he liked using such symbols to address a delicate subject like mourning.
Cattani said childhood offered a way into the subject because of the innocence with which Filo encounters the world. He said the boy observes the world with an innocence that people lose as they grow up, giving him the strength to explore and understand the importance of small things that have value. Cattani added that childhood is powerful because it is where the person begins, and what people absorb as children is transmitted in later stages of life.
The director placed “Forever With You” within a longstanding Italian cinematic tradition of using children to explore larger social and emotional realities. He called Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves” an “absolute masterpiece” and described his own film as distinctly Italian in its setting, dialects and other locally rooted elements. Shot in autumn in Calabria, the film makes the region’s forests a character in their own right, though Cattani believes the story can travel because the loss of a mother is a theme that unites the whole world.
Cattani had already presented the film at the Locarno Film Festival but was curious about how young audiences in the Middle East would respond. He said he was impressed when children came up after the screening to thank him, congratulate him and tell him how excited they were by the film. Their reaction reinforced his view that emotions connected to people very close to us, such as a parent, and connected to love unite the whole world. “For me, cinema must be emotionally rooted,” he said, adding that a story must be emotional or he is not interested.
Cattani also sees festivals such as SIFF as potential bridges between the Italian and Arab film industries at a time when he says independent filmmaking in Italy faces increasing financial pressure. Beyond cultural exchange, he hopes stronger ties could eventually extend to production and financing.
His next film returns to an adult protagonist. Set around the marble quarries of Carrara in Tuscany, where Cattani grew up, it centers on the “medico condotto,” village doctors who once served small Italian communities and whose role disappeared following changes to the country’s health system. Cattani is also developing “Young Rebels,” based on the true story of a group of young scouts who defied a fascist ban on Catholic associations and continued their activities in secret, helping thousands of people targeted by the regime escape across the mountains into Switzerland. He said it is a film about freedom, about rebelling against the imposition and choosing to embrace freedom and help persecuted people.
After “Forever With You,” Cattani plans to continue exploring stories centered on childhood. He argued that children have a lot to say and a lot to give to adults, and that today’s young people have an incredible maturity.
Sources: Variety.