Paolo Virzì, one of Italy’s most acclaimed directors, screenwriters, and film producers, was a guest at Cinema In Verde in 2023 with his film Siccità, featured in the Rassegna section. This year, he returns to the festival as the President of the expert jury that will award the Ginkgo d’Oro to the best film in competition, taking place from September 19 to 22 at the Botanical Garden.
What made you accept the role of jury president?
Cinema In Verde strikes me as an initiative that deserves to be encouraged and celebrated as it should. The festival focuses on the most crucial issue of our time—the survival of the planet—while attempting to approach it through fictional and narrative storytelling. These major themes intersect with personal stories of professional and relational breakdowns, which ultimately tie into the universal question of our existence. Just today, as I rode my scooter with my helmet practically boiling, I was thinking about a line from my latest film, attributed to the character played by Emanuela Fanelli. In listing both personal and global dramas, she exclaims, “These damn 2,000 degrees—we’re all about to go up in flames!”
Climate collapse isn’t just about heat; it also means extreme weather events, floods, and hydrogeological instability. Scientists have long been counting down, and the time left is getting shorter every year. It has now been officially recognized by the UN and all scientific papers that emissions and fossil fuel consumption are not just some trivial matter. Yet, only a few activists—sometimes in radical ways—try to draw attention to this issue. It is essential that this theme finds its way into all the narratives of our time.
This year’s festival theme is “Stories That Inspire, Actions That Save.” You’ve told many stories yourself. What can you tell us about the character played by Fanelli in your latest film, which you mentioned earlier?
First and foremost, it’s a playful take on a woman who is rough around the edges, constantly arguing with the world, and suddenly struck by auteur cinema. Through her sharp-tongued rants, she confronts collective pain, including the fact that we are quite literally burning at 2,000 degrees. Daniela, portrayed by Emanuela with extraordinary irony, does not initially appear to possess any particular sensitivities beyond the crude, petty instincts of control and resentment. However, underneath it all, she is consumed by a cry of anguish that echoes grand, universal themes. These kinds of stories, with all their contradictions, are increasingly making their way into fiction cinema, as we aim to showcase with Cinema In Verde.
In short, the reality of certain environmental issues is forcefully entering fiction as well.
It has always been this way. The act of storytelling gives voice to people’s lives and introduces a therapeutic element. The moment a story is told, things that seem unbearable begin to take on a comprehensible dimension and become manageable. Storytelling is our medicine. In Healing Fiction: Stories That Heal, renowned Jungian psychoanalyst James Hillman reflects on this concept: what is it that made us human? Surely, it was that moment when we gathered around a fire, engaging in the spontaneous act of listening to and inventing stories—this is what made us different from other primates, what made us “human.” It nourishes artistic, pictorial, musical, literary, and cinematic expression. When you tell a story about love, personal growth, or family conflict, you cannot ignore the world around you—it inevitably infiltrates and shapes the narrative.
This year at Cinema In Verde, various stories intertwine with themes that may seem unrelated to environmental issues. Among the scheduled films is Io Capitano, presented by Matteo Garrone.
Io Capitano is the tale of an epic journey undertaken by many, especially young people, from uninhabitable and increasingly desertified regions. While it is framed as a migratory adventure, the film sheds light on what happens before the images we are accustomed to seeing on television—those of people arriving in extreme conditions on overcrowded boats. The film also highlights an entire continent undergoing desertification, much like what is happening in the southern Italian countryside, in Sicily, where agriculture is becoming nearly impossible. It is crucial to recognize that the delicate balance that once made Earth habitable is now disrupted and must be safeguarded.
