English text translation

In 1927 in Paris - during the opening night of Antonin Artaud's "Alfred Jarry" theatre - a play by Roger Vitrac titled: "Les Mystères de l'amour" was staged.

SURREAL                                              FRAGMENTARY                                       ONIRIC

Vitrac's play (which I was able to read in an old 1970s Einaudi edition) is a broken kaleidoscope from which to intercept reflected shards of the lives of two lovers: Patrizio and Lea. We witness, not only as passive spectators - or readers - but as active witnesses, the unbridled race of their loving, hating, and existing.

As Parisian critics wrote, the play is an "attempt at mental photography" where the two lovers "love each other, kill each other, resurrect, beat each other, have children" or again where "a man beats a woman, adores her, is betrayed, dreams of killing her, of being killed by her...".

In this funny (in the noblest sense of the term) mosaic of images - which strike you quickly, without giving you time to remember them because they are immediately chased by new sisters - one in particular remained embedded in my mind, like a bullet in metal, allowing itself to be remembered:

PATRIZIO "Quiet! The day is in my left eye!" [...] 

LEA "And in your right eye Patrizio?"

PATRIZIO "A mountain" 

LEA "Can I see?" 

PATRIZIO "If you want."

What an image! Too beautiful to remain just a stray shard of a forgotten theatrical work. It would have been an unforgivable sin to overlook it and leave it there: this sin will not be committed.

I have written a short film that starts from this shard! It wants to tell the end of a love: the last spasms of two lovers self-confined in the same room - in the same life - only for a drag of habit. Two lovers who steal each other's shoes to prevent the other from running away.

Two souls who manage to escape from that room only with fantasy, imagining a green meadow where to do what they would really like to do, where they love each other, kill each other, resurrect, beat each other.

Two lovers who have nothing more to say to each other, nothing to share, except for spots of color and piles of words that serve only to fill, for a little while longer, the gloomy silence that envelops them.

The form of the short film is chosen to try to succeed where Vitrac perhaps failed: "To compress into a few minutes, in a few words and in a few gestures innumerable situations, sensibilities, ideas, sensations, facts and symbols."

The short film will attempt - to the best of the possibilities that the world offers to a group of people (like us) who range from 20 to 24 years old - to tell all this.

Starting from a collective and deep love for theatre and cinema, for the DADA of the early twentieth century and the New Wave of the 60s, for alt-rock and comics, for the theatre of Cruelty and La Chimera, between the fairy-tale and the grotesque, mixing everything together, trying to reach that wonderful form of broken kaleidoscope that Vitrac managed to transmit.

We cannot assure anything, of Vitrac it was said: "On stage, all this is resolved, if I can express myself so, in a hodgepodge that is a cross between cinema, music-hall and college farce" so who knows what can be said of us (who still do college) but we want to try, and to try we need you!

This crowdfunding campaign will serve entirely to finance the project, in all its parts: from the purchase of materials for set design and costumes, to gasoline to go to the hills, passing through the rental of lights and microphones, up to the dream of shooting the external parts on film.

Together with this text, you will find attached some pages of the script to intrigue you and give you confidence that the project already exists in its physical form!