“This is a film dedicated to those who, faced with something so strong, decide to go through it instead of running away”. A very intimate movie, says Valerio Mastandrea who is the director of Nonostante, his second work, after Ride (2018), screenwriter with Enrico Audenino, protagonist and also producer with his company Damocle, in collaboration with HT Film, Tenderstories and Rai Cinema.
Nonostante opens the Orizzonti section of the Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia, 81st edition. The film will probably be released in March 2025 and stars Dolores Fonzi, Lino Musella and Laura Morante alongside Mastandrea.
Nonostante, the plot
It’s the story of a man who peacefully spends his days in the hospital without too many worries, sheltered from everything and everyone, without responsibilities and problems of any kind. Everything changes for him when a new person is admitted to the same ward. She is a restless, angry companion, she does not accept anything about that condition and is not willing to wait, in some way she wants to leave that place, dead or alive. The meeting with her turns his life upside down and forces him to face his emotions and come to terms with his own condition.
A love story
For Mastandrea, the idea was to tell a love story, but inserted in an original context like a hospital in such extreme and borderline conditions that “it immediately became a metaphor”. Mastandrea, together with the screenwriter Audenino, consulted specialists from the Fondazione Santa Lucia, dedicated to hospital neurorehabilitation and research in neuroscience. However, they immediately understood that they could not tell that complex world, incredible and full of nuances and different stories. It’s a difficult world to enter. “You have to have enormous respect for this world – underlines the director – that’s why we focused more on the meeting of two symbols, life and death, with an enormous feeling like sudden love”.
“It’s a love story inserted in a metaphorical context and the people stuck in their beds are the people stuck in life that the encounter with love puts in front of a fragility and a vulnerability that you have to have the courage to face. It’s a film about life and when you talk about life you always have to keep death in mind. I’m happy that the spiritual approach of the movie arrives, but we never wanted to set up the clinical one“.
“Love saves the life of one of the two characters, not the other, but in any case they didn’t stand still waiting for things to happen“, adds Mastandrea who also clarifies the meaning of a laconic yet highly evocative title. “It’s a very intimate film and I don’t think that if I continue to be a director I will ever ignore this more sentimental side, like I did as an actor. I am a ‘despite’. The ‘despite’ are people who can be crossed by an enormous feeling and you recognize each other when you meet them“.
According to Audenino, Nonostante is a film played on oxymorons, on what it means to be alive and to be dead and it tells of a parenthesis within which, in an apparently immobile way, fundamental things can happen. “It is a continuous paradox between feeling good and feeling bad, between life and death,” Mastandrea explains, “and forgetting means losing yourself forever”.
