«During a Zoom meeting I see my cell phone flashing. It’s a text message from the Holy See and I say a sentence that I never thought I’d say: sorry, the Vatican wrote to me, they invite me to a meeting with the Pope…”.
Leonardo Di Costanzo, director David di Donatello for the film Ariaferma, tells of this exciting and unexpected call. «The Holy See participated in the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art with a pavilion hosted in the women’s prison on Giudecca island. For the first time in history, a Pope attended the Biennial. The Pope arrived at 8 in the morning: first he spoke with the inmates, then with the invited artists and the authorities in the chapel of the prison itself.”
The Vatican greatly appreciated the profound humanity that permeates its film with Toni Servillo and Silvio Orlando – also David di Donatello as best leading actor for “Ariaferma” – and for this reason it wanted it there. A great honor. What did Pope Francis tell you?
«He spoke to the artists and therefore to me too. You explained how one of the most serious causes is always the rejection of the other. Selfishness — she said — makes us function like solitary islands instead of collaborative archipelagos. And she made an appeal to her “artist friends”: imagine a city where no human being is considered a stranger.”
Did you also explain why the Holy See installed its Pavilion in a prison?
«The importance of this choice was explained above all by Cardinal José Tolentino of the Dicastery of Culture: in the past – he explained – the Church has had a very strong bond with art and it is evident in all the churches and monasteries, but recently there were moments of tension. It is as if the Church had difficulty interpreting the freedom of thought of artists. With this decision we wanted to reopen an interrupted dialogue.”
Was he the only witness to the world of cinema?
«Ottavia Piccolo was with me: we were truly incredulous in the face of such an unexpected call. I had already been in that prison the very year we presented Ariaferma in Venice. By agreement between the penitentiary management and the Mostra, we had screened the film for an audience of inmates. There were also Silvio Orlando and Salvatore Striano; we had a debate with the guests: some of them remembered me the other day.”
How did they react to your film?
«Reflecting on the concept of trust. What really moves, what makes people change is not the punishment, but the act of trust with which someone opens a loan towards them; in the film the character played by Servillo is the protagonist. I remember that the same theme came up in the dialogues in the Bollate prison which, as we know, is a model penitentiary, very liberal: there is also a restaurant open to the public. Trust also pays off from the point of view of deterring crime: in Bollate and similar penitentiaries the percentage of recidivism is equal to 8/10 of cases, in normal prisons the rate rises to 60-70 percent. It’s not rhetoric, it’s data.”
Pope Francis is not someone who sends you to say: what words struck you?
«He made a very touching speech which reflects what I have been reflecting on for years: prison is separation, it tries to ward off “evil” because one is afraid of becoming infected: but separation is the opposite of humanity. The beatings start from this, the prisoner is not seen as a man, but as someone capable of “infecting”. The film instead tells us that small gestures are enough to free the particle of humanity that reconnects what prison separates.”
Does Sunday’s meeting trace a furrow in a different direction?
«I hope and want to pay homage to the management of the Giudecca prison which allows visits to the Pavilion every day: groups of 20 people listen to the inmates explaining the works. Thus art – as Francis recalled – welcomes the contradictions of society and fights against racism, exclusion and what he defined with a neologism as poorophobia: art must welcome the wounds, without giving in to the lure of the market. A warning from a profound connoisseur of contemporary dynamics.”
On punishment and guilt, you and the Pope are looking in the same direction.
«On this topic it was moving: each of us has something to make amends for – he told the inmates – including me. He went through the bars.”
He became a prisoner among the inmates. How does his cinema. Ultimately it is a revolutionary act.
«It is, the Pope is a revolutionary: he has clearly indicated that art must be disturbing, not enslaving…».
The prison news of 2024 is full of old and new horrors: records of suicides, even among young people, and cases of serious violence such as that in the Beccaria juvenile prison. Is there still little or no harm done to avoid them?
«There are jurists and experts who have been working on this for a long time: I am a filmmaker, I have no recipes. I observe, rework and tell my point of view.”
Which, in short, what is it?
«Locking someone in a cage is a humanly violent act; Silvio Orlando spent the few minutes of a take in his cell, but every time he came out exhausted. And he asked Salvatore Striano, the actor who has had direct experience of prison: “But how did you manage to resist?”. Faced with this unnatural act, there are those who respond by feeling authorized to act as executioners and those who are open to small gestures of humanity: a female officer told me that she spent a whole night, hand in hand with an inmate who was worried about her son…”.
Many officers, Beccaria docet case, are not trained in the complexities of a prison, let alone a juvenile one.
«This is a crucial point. It requires very specialized training as well as human skills and a strong sensitivity. Many agents trivialize; I have often heard them say: it’s just my job, eight hours and I’m gone. It is an attempt to make a job that cannot be aseptic. In prisons, what is fundamental are not so much the activities that teach a trade – certainly useful, of course – but those that help the detained people to reunite with themselves, especially with that dark part that can transform and evolve: it is a process that puts the theater is well underway.”
Next movie?
«I finished writing a screenplay always on the theme of guilt, repair and redemption: the same topic as L’Intrusa and Ariaferma. There are those who say that my cinema is a continuous perennial variation of Antigone. Maybe it’s true: mine is a Greek tragedy question.”
