Day 6. Penultimate day of the official section of the Mostra. Two more movies. The day started with Flesh out, Italian production that, this time, takes us to northwest Africa, a Mauritania. Penida is a young woman at the gates of celebrating a marriage arranged by her family with a man she does not know or has ever seen. With a view to complying with tradition and facing the wedding, her mother submits her to a local custom called gavage, A strict food program to gain weight according to the beauty canons of your community. But seen he resists obeying his family, Which brings some problems. Determined to break the barriers that prevent you from organizing your future freely, The whole world is questioned. As the only way out, He has his relationship with her friends, The music he listens to his headphones and the hope that everything will change.
Michela Occhipinti, responsible for this work, He reported in front of the public of La Mostra the origin of this custom in which he focuses his debut on the feature film. "He gavage Start as a traditional issue. He started in the past so that the family of the family could demonstrate his wealth, Your economic well -being, If he had enough money to feed the women of his family. Over time, This became an aesthetic fee, In a beauty model. " As Occhipinti commented in perfect Castilian, Origin, The gavage served to introduce young girls in adult society ahead. "They do it with girls from 8,9, 10, 11 years, Because if you want a lot of weight in a short time you enter before normal in puberty and you can give your daughter in marriage sooner. What happens is that in the film we decided to do it with an older girl because we did not want to deal with the issue of violence about children, but to talk about a woman, because we were interested in the issue of women's body in general. " Fortunately, however, This custom seems in a frank descent within Mauritanian society. It all depends on the social context in which we are. “The Mauritanian society has evolved and the women who do gavage There are many less. I would say that in cities they can be a 20% Girls who submit to gavage, To be fed forced, But in the villages, In the desert, a lot more", Comentaba Occhipinti.
The idea of Flesh Out, He came to the director while he was reflecting on herself, about the evolution of their own body and the role that certain beauty canons play in modern societies. In the words of the Italian filmmaker: "The idea of the movie came to me in 2011. I was reflecting on my body because I started having wrinkles, to age and I wondered why this created so many problems. Then I started thinking why women's bodies have always had that pressure in society, From appearance to aesthetic models, They constantly change. Let's think about art. In it 1800 Women were painted with flowery bodies. Then the models have changed to be thin and with great breasts and ass, and then super-of the grants, etc. And I started thinking about the issue of freedom. I thought it was more free than I am because, but, It would not be a weight for me to get older from an aesthetic point of view. The other I understand, It is a much deeper and more philosophical issue that is related to the life that has happened, death, Decadence and all that. " The problem was presented when choosing the leitmotif that served as a vehicle for this reflection that Occhipinti was doing at that time. It was then that he was aware of this custom that was celebrated in Mauritania. "It was an issue that needed to tell in a movie, But I didn't know how. At first, I had planned to tell the story of a woman who undergoes a lot of plastic surgery or a girl who suffers from anorexia. But after taking a few months thinking about this, I found an article about the gavage that hit me a lot. At first, I felt a certain distance. Thought, But those girls are crazy. But then I thought we were the same thing in the sense that the route you make to reach a different form of your body, either stretch or cut parts of your body to put or remove things, or make a very strong regime to lose weight or win it, It was the same ", explanate. "The objective of the way one wants to obtain is totally secondary, What I think is that the route is very similar to everything that concerns what one does to his body to satisfy the look of the other, of the other, of society, by the look of others. "
A subject, the one of savage, that is not exempt from contradictions, as exposed in the film and this was exposed by the public during the colloquium after the projection, Because while seeing he wants to escape the pressure he suffers from the family, on the other hand, It does not seem to make too much suspicions of the canons imposed from the West. Contradictions, however, They do not betray, The Italian filmmaker defended, The main thesis of your film. "In each society there are a lot of contradictions. Only the contradictions of our own society do not see them because we are accustomed. But the contradictions of the societies that we do not know seem much more because they are new. ” And is that, beyond the main issue, Ochipinti wanted to make a fresco of contemporary Mauritan society and, Starting from this, of the consequences of a globalization where local customs bind with consumption habits of a world in which information and tastes no longer understand borders. “The difference has to be made between rural and cities areas because in cities there is a lot of mixture of everything. Many people have asked me why I used the song Ring of fire by Johnny Cash [that appears at some point in the movie in the mouth of one of the characters] And that is because everything arrives in Africa. It's not how he does 30 years that when you came to a city you only found local things. With globalization you find everything everywhere. It is a complicated country. I think it would have to be a lifetime to understand it. For us it was important that rebellion [Looking] pass through your body. She is a low middle class girl who is accustomed to respecting tradition, But at the same time it was a very modern girl who can leave, That has mobile, who talks to her friends by WhatsApp. But she is used to being respectful. His mother has done the same and her grandmother too. "
Despite what is commented, Occhipinti no has pretended to const a reaped moral. His is a proposal that aspires to stay perhaps in the field of suggestion, That it is the spectator himself who reflects on everything that is subtly pointed out on the tape. “The end is open because for me it was very important to be as close as possible to reality. We never know what will happen after the end. I believe that the closed finals are very self -complacing, whether positive or negative, because they make us out of the cinema saying what happened. But for me everything moves in gray. There are few things in life that are white-bliny, Black Black. There are many nuances ", concluded.
Until the high mountains of Albania, the second of yesterday's proposals led us. Con A shelter among the clouds The director Albanes Robert Budina presented in La Mostra his second work in long format. A story that leads us to the old confrontation between religions. Over there, In the highest mountains, Far from any footprint of the technologization of the contemporary world, A modest shepherd of goats discovers on one of the walls of the small village mosque in which he lives, A paint hidden behind the plaster layers that have been overlapping over the years. The problem is that painting is a representation of the Christian Jesus Christ. After the unexpected visit of a couple of restaurateurs sent by the Government, It is discovered that there was a time when the mosque was at some point a temple of this religion. To do? faithful, The pastor who has discovered painting, It has the solution: Share the sacred space with the Christian communities of the area. But the idea does not seem to content everyone. While, Besnik's brothers have come to the town to visit their father, an old communist who is about to die. The family, divide between the two religions, will bring the old quarrels in light.
The story of A shelter among the clouds He enters the history of Albania to rescue some real events that happened five hundred years ago, According to Robert Budina at a press conference. "There is a real part [of history] What happened 500 years, During the Ottoman Empire, When a church was converted into a mosque. So, The Muslims of this small town in northern Albania thought, Like many of the town's families were mixed, in which one brother could be Muslim and the other Catholic, now that they had a place to pray, They said, Why not leave the place for your Christian brothers? Then they decided that one day of the week the Church could be used by Catholics, and six for Muslims. " Leaving historical references aside, The origin of the story shown by the film is in the interest that Buddine himself had to reflect on the mixture of religions in his own family and, They are this, About his own identity. “Why did I make this film responds to the fact that I am an unbeliever, And my wife, What is the film's producer, It is Muslim. And one day, Our teenage children asked us, What are we?”, The director commented. “The second reason is because these mountains seem that they are the house of God. And the third reason is what happened around Charlie Hebdo magazine. I wanted to convey the idea that religion does not divide people, It is politics and their interests around religions that puts one people against others. "
To public and press questions, The Albanian case referred directly to other conflicts in our recent history, How is the war of ancient Yugoslavia. “For me the war in the ex-yugoslavia was not a war of religion. It was an ethnic war and religion was used to face people from each other. It was the message I wanted to convey. If they lived together for centuries, Why at that time they faced each other?”, Budina reflected. Despite these similarities with your story, Arben Bajraktaraj, actor who plays Besnik, protagonist of the film and also invited by the festival, established some differences that undoubtedly enrich the ideas proposed by this work. For Bajraktaraj "the question for Albanians is different. All tribes living in the mountains have the same bloodline. And for them this line of consanguinity is more important than the line that establishes religion. There is always a supremacy of the line of consanguinity about religion. This is because they have brothers living in the same house being of different religions. It is not an abstract idea. While we shot, Holy Week was celebrated in those same mountains, Easter. A party in which all the Muslims of the town participated in the celebration. This happened during filming, Not a hundred years ago ", The actor of Kosovar origin stressed.
Albania's own history refers, in the director's words, to the secret of this unusual coexistence between factions so confronted in other parts of the world. “I don't alban, during communism, Religion did not exist. But this is not the reason why Albanians live in harmony. The real reason is because for centuries Albanians are people who have been attacked by other peoples. And to resist these attacks, families needed to live together ”, Budina explained. "The most important thing in this structure was the pater family, which is the oldest man of all families, Then it is the father of each family, And the third is the earth, The country. And in the end, The latest, It is religion. That is why family members live together. Because the most important thing for them is to protect families over religion. "
Political confrontations, geostrategic interests that left their mark on the inhabitants of these small forgotten locations. All societies have their pending accounts. In this case, It was the communist period that would forever mark the spirit of a society that had lived in harmony without other tools that popular knowledge and its own customs. A reflection that Budina represents here in the figure of Besnik's father, an old communist who, A step away from the grave, suffers the weight of consciousness for the sins of his past. "I believe that communism in Albania is not over", The Albanian filmmaker commented. “In Albania there are still remains of this mentality and I wanted the father to feel bad because he did something bad to his own son. So he dies, But he doesn't do it alone. These people who committed crimes in Albania during communism have to apologize for what he did. We never managed to separate us from the past. Communism is still alive in our country and, somehow, They never apologized. I wanted to make them aware of what they did. Like the father [de loyal], They will never die alone. "
A shelter among the clouds It transports us, With these elements, to a place that seems taken from another moment in history and, above all, to a space where the passage of time is measured in another way. A time and space outside the haste and routines of the contemporary world. An experience that, Just as I hope it happens to the viewer, It was a change in the perception of the Albanian filmmaker: “This served me to discover a new dimension in this mountain landscape where there is no time. Here time stops and I had time to reflect, And now I have to say that I live much better”.
