Italian filmmaker Fabrizio Cattani brought “Forever With You,” his exploration of childhood, grief and the loss of a parent, to the Middle East for the first time this week, with the film receiving a Green Carpet premiere at the 13th Sharjah Intl. Film Festival for Children and Youth in the UAE. With Italy celebrated as this year’s Country of Honor, the festival has put a spotlight on the country’s cinema.
For Cattani, “Forever With You” also marks a turn toward younger audiences after previous films centered on more difficult adult subjects. Adapted from an Italian novel of the same name, “Forever With You” follows Filo, a young boy struggling to understand the death of his mother. Set in 1998 and told through flashbacks, the film turns his journey through grief into an adventure in which the people around him represent different parts of his inner world.
Rullo, his friend, is the emotional part. The father is the mature part, Amelie is the childish part and Guelpho is the scary part,” Cattani tells Variety. I liked using these symbols to deal with such a delicate subject as mourning.” For Cattani, childhood offered a way into that subject precisely because of the innocence with which Filo encounters the world.
We are sponges as children. What we absorb, we transmit in the later stages of our lives.” That perspective also places “Forever With You” within a longstanding Italian cinematic tradition of using children to explore larger social and emotional realities. Cattani points to Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves” as an “absolute masterpiece,” while describing his own film as distinctly Italian in its setting, dialects and other locally rooted elements.
Shot in the autumn in Calabria, the “toe” at the end of the Italian peninsula’s boot, the film makes the region’s forests a character in their own right. Yet Cattani believes the story can travel because its central experience transcends its Italian setting. Cattani had already presented the film at the Locarno Film Festival, but was curious about how young audiences in the Middle East would respond to it.
A story must be emotional. Otherwise, I’m not interested.” Cattani also sees festivals such as SIFF as potential bridges between the Italian and Arab film industries at a moment when he says independent filmmaking in Italy faces increasing financial pressure. Beyond cultural exchange, he hopes stronger ties could eventually extend to production and financing.
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