Bruno Miguel Resende - What is cinema for you?

Alessandro Leone: Cinema is a basic need, as eating, sleeping and love can be: is the need to tell and/or listen to stories, in order to understand the world, identify its social, cultural, anthropological transformation. Cinema is often the architect of this transformation – which is partly where its charm comes from – and it affects the collective imagination with interpretations of the present, reinterpretations of the past, assumptions about the future.

 

 

Bruno Miguel Resende - What are your main influences?

Alessandro Leone: Mostly figurative art, because I was trained at an Academy of Fine Arts. I’m also keen on the cinema of civil commitment.

 

 

Bruno Miguel Resende - Who is your favorite filmaker?

Alessandro Leone: The Italian Vittorio De Seta and the Indian Satyajit Ray, they are different directors but they share the same view of reality between objectivity and aesthetic research, for the poetry

and the grace with which they narrated worlds that were disappearing. And then Truffaut, for the way he managed to talk about childhood, as a complex world and a place of passions.

 

 

Bruno Miguel Resende - Who is your favorite writer?

Alessandro Leone: I love Philip Roth, for his ability to enter his characters’ psychology but also Marguerite Yourcenar, certainly among the greatest, capable of linguistic nuances. They are different from each other.

 

 

Bruno Miguel Resende - The main focus of cinema is entertainment or art?

Alessandro Leone: I think art, but I really love when a movie has the right mix between the two elements. And there are a lot of filmakers  who know how to do entertainment and research.

 

 

Bruno Miguel Resende - What is utopia for you?

Alessandro Leone: It deals with the cinema, with its visionary, dreamlike nature; a tension towards creating worlds and make them possible. It’s nice that they are sometimes unattainable, that remain uncatchable, but guides at the same time. Utopias move, create flows of energy, give rise to transformations.

 

Bruno Miguel Resende - What is the main message of your film?

Alessandro Leone: It starts from the concept "repair". In Italian "repair" means to fix something, to mend, but also to seek shelter, especially in adversity. To do this we have to recognize our own fragilities and vulnerabilities, so

as to "repair" as a form of building the world, even a small world. I thought I would look at children to discover how fundamental all this is to becoming adults able to "repair".

 

Bruno Miguel Resende - What is your next project?

Alessandro Leone: I am developing a story for a docufilm that explores the devastating consequences that climate change will have on the inhabitants of the poorest areas of the planet. It's an important project I have in mind.

 

Bruno Miguel Resende - What is more important the text or the image?

Alessandro Leone: In my opinion, in cinema they are siblings, one is not more important than the other: writing is the generative system; image is the translation of the word, it preserves the words, as a seed, to transform them into vision.

What is more fascinating?