“I was struck by reading the book Il Seminatore by Mario Cavatore. I discovered a little-known story of a country, Switzerland, that, in the common imagination, we associate with great democracy. Reading about how those children were torn from their families led me to reflect on the sense of justice, and from there came the urgency to make a film about it. I wanted to talk about a story highlighting man’s inability to understand diversity to offer a story that could be useful to the world.” This is how Giorgio Diritti tells the origin of Lubo, his latest effort presented in a competition at Venice 80. “What we see in the film is a mirror of our days. We are at war. The Russians are still kidnapping Ukrainian children. Returning mistakes. The need to tell this story stems precisely from the attempt to give a political signal of awareness, not an institutional one.”
Shot in three languages (Italian, Swiss German and Jenisch) between Italy (Trentino Alto Adige) and Switzerland, the film was a significant production effort, Diritti explains. “It was a complex film, between languages, locations and historical reconstructions. The crew had become a bit like Lubo’s wagon, nomadic and itinerant.”
The absolute protagonist in the role of Lubo is German actor Franz Rogowski, who was challenged by the project’s linguistic variety. “I have practically lost my German identity. Every film I make is in another language!” joked Rogowski, explaining, however, that in reality, the difficulty of a project “gives him so much drive and energy to create life.” Valentina Bellè plays Margherita, a woman who, for Lubo, represents a chance for tenderness and a desire to start over. Diritti says about the couple: “Valentina and Franz are two crazy cool guys! [laughs] Franz has enormous talent, which he has already expressed in other works. On the set, I scrambled and put him in complicated conditions, but he welcomed the fatigue with great professionalism. On the other hand, Valentina has poetry inside, a sense of simplicity and naiveté that I was looking for in that character.”
