ShorTS International Film Festival: meeting with Carlotta Gamba

“They often ask me when I asked myself or when I realized I wanted to become an actress. In reality, these passions such as dance, music and acting have always accompanied me. So I tried to enter the academy at 19, but they wouldn’t let me in at that time. I tied it to my finger and told myself that no, I had to enter the academy to study acting. And so this gave me even more strength, perhaps I was more strong then than now, because in fact I had nothing and I still had to conquer everything. Everything was possible. The next year I came back and was hooked. I studied for three years and at the end of those three years I managed to get into an agency and the first audition was precisely the one for America Latina“.

Thus began the Masterclass of Carlotta Gamba, an Italian actress born in 1997 who yesterday afternoon, at the Miela theatre in Trieste, received the special Prospettiva Award dedicated to her by the ShorTS International Film Festival. An opportunity to discuss with the young interpreter from Turin, who allowed us to shed light on the first steps she took in the world of cinema, starting from the first set (that of America Latina), on which Gamba had to confront the D’Innocenzo brothers: “On the set they say many things, sometimes even opposite things, to then put you in the difficulty of having to choose, of having to make a choice between black and white, so that you, not having time to think, somehow have to act and that’s it. I would like to say that this first experience was easy, wonderful, instead it was very complicated, difficult, because this film is a great film, with an incredible protagonist, Germano. I was scared, very scared, but Elio helped me a lot, he told me to stay calm because we are only a small part of the whole, and this is a beautiful way of conceiving cinema, and it also tells a lot about Elio, who is an extremely humble man and very diligent in his work, almost like a craftsman”.

The actress’s career, confronted with the director Mazzacurati on the occasion of the film Billywas then enriched by the experience Amusiadirected by Marescotti Ruspoli. A work that, without a doubt, played a very important role in Gamba’s education: “In his own way”in fact, he says, “this film taught me another world of cinema, that is, first works, which are all totally different from films by already established directors, because the feeling is a bit as if everyone was doing something. This happens even in the most established cinema of course, but in first works you feel belonging to a group even stronger. The work with Marescotti was interesting because we worked on the script, we rehearsed, it was a much longer process, because we had to interpret this character who had this disease. Clearly the two previous experiences had filled me a lot, that’s why, in some way, I then understood that you learn cinema by doing it. Surely in this girl I had to play there were wounds that could recall my own, so first and foremost there was a work of empathy. On the other hand, this work teaches me to look at others as if I were looking at myself”.

After Billy e Amusia It was then the turn of two costume operas: Dante by Pupi Avati e Gloria! by Margherita Vicario, presented among others at the last Berlinale. New entrance doors for a still different, but equally instructive cinema: “Many things change, because what you wear tells about you. Then obviously, as I said before, the substance, that is, the human, is always that, and in fact Margherita (Vicario) decided to tell this story starting from herself, from her condition as a woman who makes music today, but she imagined a woman who made music in the nineteenth century and in the end didn’t see many differences, so it depends on how you look at things. But clearly working with period clothing is a fact, because it is also tiring for the body. Then they were two very different experiences, because with Pupi Avati, I had to play a character highly imagined by all of us, because Beatrice, Dante’s muse, we all studied her, we all imagined her, so I was afraid of disappointing the expectations of our imaginations. But when you meet directors like Pupi Avati, who are directors who feel what they are doing with their hands, you let yourself go, you leave yourself completely in their hands, without fear. For Pupi Avati, Dante and Beatrice were two boys who fell in love at a time when they couldn’t love each other, or couldn’t even think of loving each other. He really wanted to work on this, as if they were two kids of today”.

In the end Dostoevsky. The latest effort by the D’Innocenzo brothers. The one that Carlotta Gamba does not hesitate to define “to date, my most important experience”. A total experience that the young actress faced “360 degrees, even if I’m not the protagonist, so I’m there much less than the protagonist Filippo Timi”. An experience for which, she herself admits, “I also worked aesthetically, I had to go on a diet to gain some weight, they cut my hair, so many things changed about me. It was the most difficult experience but also the most beautiful and satisfying for me. When the set ended I was very satisfied, I was very happy because the journey was beautiful and very tortuous. I am very honored to have been part of it because my character is a full character, and when it is like that, when there are so many things to tell it is always very nice to be an actress and to be able to bite them, to be able to live them”.