Cannes, 25 May 2024 – ‘The Damned’, first fiction feature film by Roberto Minerviniwon the award for best direction in the section Un Certain Regardin fact the second most important competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Known for his extraordinary quality as a documentary filmmaker, this time Minervini builds an intense reflection on violence within a story set during the American Civil War. The episode narrated by the film is that of a platoon of Confederate soldiers that awaits an invisible enemy. The film is co-produced by Rai cinema and is currently in theaters with Lucky Red. Roberto Minervini was born in Stopped in 1970 and grew up in Mount Uranus: he graduated in Economics and Commerce in Ancona. Since the early 2000s he has lived and worked between Italy and the United States.
“For many of us, being at a festival is a reason for survival and our films exist because there are festivals like Cannes and surprises like this.”
After three appearances at the Cannes festival over the course of eleven years (with the documentaries “Stop the pounding Heart” in 2013 and “Louisiana” in 2015) the Marche director Roberto Minervini, born in 1970, finally achieved consecration on Friday evening, winning the Un Certain Regard award – the second competition after the main one, specifically dedicated to avant-garde languages - with his “The Damned” (Teresa Mannino among the producers) for best film direction. A great satisfaction, admits the director who has been “American” for many years, after fourteen years living in Texas and three in New York, where he currently lives. “The Damned”, a costume film on the Civil War to talk about war as an existential condition and dehumanizing act, is however a return to fiction from the early days, but the “Minervini Style” direction is all there in that non-giving respite for the protagonists who are followed by the camera.
Roberto Minervini, three times at Cannes and also awarded for best director: could some Italian colleagues be envious?
“I believe that Cannes tries to establish an ongoing relationship with some of the authors and I must admit that this relationship had already been established with the festival even before I was selected in 2013. They followed me since the first film “The Passage” and the relationship has has always been constant.”
Even in “The Damned” the language of the documentary in shooting and filming is always around the corner. What do you think?
“It is true. This approach by the camera exists and is common to all my films, which gives back a very strong feeling of closeness also to the filmmaker in the construction of the story and the characters. From this point of view, my cinema has not changed, the writing always takes place in the production and post-production phase, therefore it starts during the shooting and does not precede it, because I come to the production of a film with a basic idea, which in this case it concerned the structure, this sort of triptych with a small interlude, a before, during and after the battle. The improvisation and participation of the actors who I really choose for what they can give me in the performance of themselves is fundamental.”
Growing up between the Seventies and Eighties in the Marche, what memories do you have?
“The places where I grew up are very strange, the hinterland, places where in the Seventies and Eighties the Communist Party took almost 80% of the votes and at the same time the center of society was the church. Two opposite poles that attracted each other, a great dissonance, great internal tensions that pushed us to take a position, there was a great harshness that was experienced in these contexts”.
There are themes dear to her, such as small communities on the margins. An interest that comes from its roots?
“My training took place in the working-class Marche, where there was this desire for revenge, a certain resentment at being so on the margins. After all, the people from the Marche hinterland, precisely by nature, even in the vernacular, are in themselves a media outsider, they are little represented in the media and therefore there has always been this feeling of starting from the rear and managing to make ends meet almost for vocation I feel close to those who, against all expectations, make it. I always look at the communities, at that humanity that leaves or has ended up in the rear. And I am also referring to the African-American community which has always been opposed.”
