-What is your earliest memory of cinema?

I was nine years old. It was summer, the heat was beating down on the streets, and my father was often away for work.
Around that time, many Blockbuster stores had already begun selling off their stock as they prepared to close.
I remember rows of DVDs at home. I spent that entire summer watching James Bond, Bruce Lee, Sergio Leone, Michael Mann…
The following year, drama was added to our school timetable.
Perhaps I still had the images from those films in my head. I remember the class being quite shy and, by contrast, how naturally I kept suggesting things: “Ms Corona, what if I deliver the line while crossing the stage from one side to the other?”
I never felt uncomfortable putting myself forward. Quite the opposite — I enjoyed it. I liked coming up with ideas.

-And after high school?

I studied at DAMS in Rome, but I immediately began looking for experiences outside university.
At nineteen, during a writing course, I met a girl who was involved with an association dedicated to the memory of Alessandra Bisceglia, a young journalist who had passed away prematurely. She suggested that we write a play together.
Il volto della normalità was staged on September 5, 2016, at the Teatro Portone in Senigallia. I remember the theatre being full and, above all, the feeling of watching something come to life in front of an audience when, only a few months earlier, it had existed solely on the page.
From that moment on, I looked for every opportunity that would allow me to experiment, observe, make mistakes, and learn. Even my thesis, which explored the possible meeting point between arthouse and commercial cinema, became the basis for a documentary.
I had the privilege of interviewing Lina Wertmüller, Neri Parenti, and Vittorio Giacci.
That film also won an award, but the award is the least important part of that memory. Being able to listen to people who had devoted their lives to cinema was infinitely more formative.

-At a certain point, you decide to apply to the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. What led you to that decision?

Covid forced me to stop, and paradoxically, that pause forced me to make a decision. I remember thinking, “Damn, am I really heading in the direction I want to go?”
The selection process was particularly tough: the previous admissions round had been suspended, which had practically doubled the number of applicants.
Getting in meant, above all, meeting other young people who shared the same obsession, measuring myself against talents very different from my own, and understanding that you don’t learn cinema simply by listening to someone teach it, but by constantly testing yourself against the way others see things.
It wasn’t always easy, but I have good memories of it. Sometimes you have to fight to make them.

-In those years, the first festivals also began to come along. What did they mean to you?

I was very happy about them, of course, but I still see them as part of my training. Through the Centro Sperimentale, I worked for two years on the Campari web series, which was presented out of competition in Venice. In 2025, three short films I had written — Kushta Mayn, L’acqua sotto la pelle and Dissidia — were presented at the European Film Festival in Lecce, and that same year Kushta Mayn, my graduation film, was selected for the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival.
They were important opportunities, and I’m grateful to the people who chose those films. But I’ve only just started. What mattered to me was getting as much practice as possible, moving between genres, and working with different people and different approaches to filmmaking.
What worries me a little is when recognition turns into a kind of accounting exercise in art: selections, awards, results. They matter, of course, but a work is born first and foremost because someone feels the need to make it exist. Everything else, when it comes, deserves only one word: thank you.

-The stories you have written are very different from one another: how much of yourself has to be in a story for it to feel authentic?

I don’t think a story has to be autobiographical in terms of what happens. But the feeling behind it has to be real.
I can write about someone from another era, another country, someone who has lived through none of the things I have lived through myself; but somewhere, I have to recognise their desire, their fear, their shame. If I can’t find that point of connection, I may build the character perfectly, but it will remain an exercise.

-And when that story reaches the audience, do you prefer them to recognise what you wanted to say, or to find something in it that you never anticipated?

I’d rather lose control of it. I’m much more interested in someone feeling something I never expected than in knowing whether they understood exactly what I meant.
That is one of cinema’s most beautiful mysteries: you create an image, give it a meaning, and then someone looks at it and places a part of their own life inside it.

-How do you imagine cinema a hundred years from now?

I think the cinema of the future will end up resembling the cinema of the past far more than we imagine. The tools will change, but it will continue to do the same thing: preserve the feeling of an era. Films do not simply tell stories; they preserve the way we desired, feared, loved, and looked at the world. They are the emotional record of our time on earth.
And I do not believe at all that everything was better in the past. Quite the opposite: the average quality of images has risen enormously. Today, a thirteen-year-old can pick up a smartphone and shoot images that, technically, would have required enormous resources only a few decades ago. And that is because they grow up surrounded by images. They absorb them, developing an instinct for framing, rhythm, and editing at a very early age.
That is where the great difference from the past lies.
Before, making a film meant going through years of work, and that difficulty forced you to learn how to master the image before you could produce it. Today, the opposite often happens: we can produce images before we have learned how to master them. And we end up being mastered by them.
But I think it is mainly a matter of time: learning to master them as quickly as we produce them. That, I believe, is where part of cinema’s future will play out.

-And now?

At the moment, I’m working to secure the funding to bring my next short film, La Roma Bene, to the screen.
The fact that the screenplay has received attention from Slamdance, BlueCat, and Outstanding Screenplays means a great deal to me, but there is still a long way to go…