«While we were shooting the film we gave ourselves a day off and went on a trip to Matera: me, my husband and Margherita, our five-year-old daughter. At a certain point she looks at me and says: “Mom, now let’s make a video, stand there. Ready? Action! Now talk. Mom, pretend that I’m still in your belly and you’re waiting for me…” There. This is how we are at home.”
Daniela Porto smiles at that memory. She says that Margherita can’t talk about her in a whisper and “so I let her imagine every time we brought her on set…”. We have it. That is, she and her husband Cristiano Bortone, who together directed Il mio postoè qui, released in cinemas on Thursday 9 May and based on the novel of the same name written by her, just published by Sperling & Kupfer.
Mid 40s, post-war, rural Calabria, patriarchy and sprouts of social changes. The film is a journey into the rigidity of that place at that time, a story of marginalization. But it is also a story of friendship, awareness and emancipation.
This is her first work both as a director and as a screenwriter. Proud of the result?
“Very. When I saw it completed on the big screen, especially in the final part, I was very excited. It’s one thing to shoot it, watch it in the editing room, it’s another thing to see it edited, grasp the details from the whole, see the images accompanied by the music… I cried.”
Why set it in Calabria?
«It’s a tribute to my origins. I was born and raised in Rome but my parents are from Calabria. The dialect of the book and the film is that of Locride.”
The choice to have the characters in his story speak in dialect is courageous.
«I said to myself: if in reality they spoke like this, why change things? So I used the dialect in the book and then also in the film”
Lorenzo (who is Marco Leonardi) in the film is a homosexual assistant to the parish priest who helps girls organize weddings. Everyone keeps him at a distance. Even Marta (Ludovica Martino) rejects him at first…
«But then he becomes contaminated with the freedom of others and begins his journey of awareness. She is also a black sheep because she is a single mother. They promise her in marriage to a man she doesn’t love and she says yes because she thinks that she is her redemption of her image of a single woman with a child. But then she begins to become aware of her rights… While I put myself in this girl’s shoes I imagined many women who today maintain relationships from which they would like to escape only because they are not economically self-sufficient.”
Without revealing too much, Il mio postoè qui is also a narrative of work and the female vote.
«Let’s not forget that his time was 1946. That was the year of great hopes that were still not unfulfilled, it was the moment of cultural innovation, of the resumption of life after the war. In that Calabria of ’46 the young Marta dared what millions of women have dared from then on in every corner of our country: to demand rights, freedom and work.”
There is a certain similarity between My place is here And There’s still tomorrowthe revelation film by Paola Cortellesi.
«We finished shooting My place is here about one year ago. We live in Berlin and we didn’t see Cortellesi’s film right away. I had heard about it, then I saw it and I’ll tell you: at that moment my blood ran cold…”
Because of those similarities?
«In the background there is a lot in common: the 1940s, a woman becoming self-aware, the vote… I thought: what bad luck! But then, upon closer inspection, there are many different points, starting with the language and the atmosphere which in Cortellesi’s film tend more towards the comical. And in any case: why not instead think that it’s lucky? It’s fortunate that that film raised interest in the themes that unite us. So it may be that this interest in this precise historical moment gives a bit of a boost to ours too… I want to see it that way.”
How did the idea for the novel come about?
«My mother told me about a homosexual who in her area, in the 1960s, helped girls organize their weddings. I imagined what could have happened if that homosexual had lived in ’46, if he had met a woman like Marta and if those two diversities had united, challenging common sentiment.”
How did you reconstruct the backgrounds, dialogues and life of that period?
«With study. I read a lot, I researched the conditions of women and homosexuals in those years in Calabria. There is a very beautiful book by Andrea Pini called When We Were Fagots: he helped me understand. I eventually deduced that the hardest thing for homosexuals at the time was to admit it to themselves and then deal with not disappointing the family. They couldn’t declare themselves too much, no ostentation, but they had their space.”
Where was the film shot?
«Between Gerace and Siderno, in the province of Reggio Calabria, and some parts in Puglia».
Let’s go back to the book. Did her husband read it while she wrote it?
“Absolutely not. I wrote it secretly and let him read it when I finished it. At a certain point I even lost the file on the computer and therefore for a certain period that book was eclipsed, it risked never seeing the light. Luckily I had printed a copy. I copied it all over again… a lot of work.”
In the end he reads it and…
«And he says to me: beautiful, make a film. And I said: okay but you do it with me. And here we are.”
A particular detail that he remembers while filming was underway.
«One night, a crazy whirlwind. The wind knocked everything down. It destroyed the market set ready for the next day.”
Let’s talk about your husband. How did you meet him?
«There was one of my best friends who in 2005 was doing an internship with him, at Orisa, his production company. She said to me: I have to leave, do you want to come and do the interview? And then I went. It wasn’t a good conversation, I was quite nervous.”
She came from a degree course at Dams and from a year of Erasmus in Spain. Right?
“Right. The spark for the big screen, however, was lit that time when a boyfriend I was madly in love with took me to see Truffaut’s Julee Jim. I was enchanted by it, that film opened my mind and put me on the path to cinema.”
Let’s resume from the job interview with Cristiano Bortone.
«Well… I started working at Orisa, obviously. At the time I had a very troubled relationship with a Spaniard, but he had a partner. We smelled each other for a couple of years and in 2007 we started dating. I was perplexed: in short, he was the boss, an established producer and director, he had already won the David di Donatello with Rosso come il cielo … I constantly wondered if I was doing the right thing.”
Answer?
«Yes, I was doing the right thing. Even though I transgressed two life rules that I had given myself: having children when I was young and never with someone who is more than 10 years older than me.”
Did he transgress the first or the second?
“Both! He is 11 years older than me and Margherita was born when I was 38. But I’ll tell you one thing: we’re really happy.”
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Tags: Honour courage single mother Calabria
