The Interview at Sea finalist in Berlin and Australia
After attending about fifteen festivals, we have a pretty good idea of the global panorama of events dedicated to independent cinema. After all, L’intervista in mare has more than one connection with methodical and scientific observation. It was born as research and its author is first and foremost a sociologist. Inevitably, the experience of festivals has also been a way to study from within the phenomenon of the proliferation of this type of cultural event. When L’intervista in mare becomes what it was supposed to be at the beginning, that is, a scientific essay (here you can find out more), we will have to dedicate a certain amount of space to the experience at the Orion International Film Festival.
Of all the disciplines that deal with human and social sciences, the one that is most directly connected to cinema is undoubtedly anthropology. Our approach is instead, as we were saying, purely sociological. The two disciplines, although clearly different, still have many points of similarity. This is also why we tried to nominate L’intervista in mare to some festivals dedicated to visual anthropology. Unfortunately, we almost always found that our approach was considered unorthodox, not sufficiently in line with a series of dogmas, more or less explicit, that should be respected in order to have the label of an anthropological work.
In the festival path, it is not the first time that we have been considered out of place, a bit “wrong”. L’intervista in mare is not a documentary in all respects, nor can it be defined as a normal work of fiction. It certainly has an experimental character, but not in the now common sense of non-narrative and in fact “difficult” cinema.
And finally, precisely, it is not an anthropological documentary even if it is based on the methods of participant observation. Instead, it has a sociological character, but sociological cinema does not have its own categorization even in the academic field. We must therefore confess that we did not have much hope of being taken into consideration by the Orion International Film Festival precisely because of its characteristic of also being a festival that looks very carefully at documentaries of an anthropological nature. But what pushed us to nominate L’intervista in mare was the curiosity to find out a little more about a festival with a double location: the very European Berlin and none other than Australia.
The main characteristic of the Orion International Film Festival is the ability to combine and blend in a formula as varied as it is coherent, productions with very different styles and assumptions, but which have in common the desire to tell the story of men and societies.
So, at a distance of 15,000 km, it is possible to organize a festival in which even L’intervista in mare can find its place among the social and anthropological documentaries, reaching and then obtaining, for the third time, the recognition of finalist film. You can get an idea of the types of films awarded in this edition here)
As the festival season draws to a close (the average duration of the journey is a year and a half), we can take stock of the geographical navigation of L’intervista in mare. In addition to Italy, where we toured the peninsula and the islands from North to South, in Europe we arrived in Iceland, Wales, Greece and indeed Germany. But the journey was also intercontinental. We crossed the Atlantic to get to New York and then all of America to Los Angeles. And now we have also landed on the other side of the Pacific, in Australia and thus reached a third continent, the furthest from us, Oceania.
However, it is not yet time for final assessments, also because the phase of distribution in cinemas through the formula of special screenings officially and definitively opens (after Venice, here is the report and Syracuse here is the report).
We have finally managed to catch up with the reports. We will now try to be regular and inform our readers, including international ones, of the next screenings.
There will be many opportunities to see the film in a cinema in the coming months. So stay connected, from the next imminent article we will return to news mode!
