Ardenza

France, 2022, 66'

When you’re sixteen everything is in black and white, your body changes, it desires; adolescence is an infatuation that burns quickly. Meetings, occupations, protests, and loves that end too soon, as if they were comets, and leave room to others that last too long and become never-healed wounds. And then life changes: you find out that people change their minds, even on important things; they can fight and never find an agreement. The adult world breaks into youth with the first outrages, and the ghost of compromise casts a dark shadow on the rage of idealism.

From a hospital room we set out for a journey backwards in time that returns substance to the memories with the grace of watercolours and the sharpness of ink. A personal journal in the form of pseudo memorial that is as translucent as dreams, accompanied by the words and drawings of the filmmaker who describes a crucial moment of existential and political maturation against a background of an equally changing Italy – with the rise of Berlusconi and the massacre of Genoa during the G8. Ardenza is both a locus of the soul and an unstoppable longing of the spirit.