19/08/2024 - The Italian director tells us about the genesis of her film, but also about the relationship, at once cathartic and perverse, that our society has with new technologies

(© Locarno Film Festival)

Real [+see also:
film review
interview: Adele Tulli
film profile], the second feature film by Italian director Adele Tulli, talks about our hyper-connected daily lives, but also about the unexpected possibilities that the digital world offers in terms of gender fluidity. Presented in the Cineasti del Presente competition at the Locarno Film Festival, the film, like a distorting mirror, confronts us with our own dependencies and fears.

Cineuropa: How was the idea for the film born, and what research on the theme did you do before you started shooting?
Adele Tulli: In fact, my interest in the issue of new technologies was born years ago. At the end of the editing, I discovered that the date of birth of the internet is considered to be 1983, and so it’s funny how from a certain point of view I, born in 1982, can testify to all the evolutions related to these technologies, to their always greater presence in our daily lives. It’s been a huge revolution that has changed our way of approaching each other. I’ve always been fascinated by these changes. Then, with the pandemic, it all took unimaginable proportions, the digitalisation of our lives has arrived at unexpected levels. In Italy, the lockdown was really strong, we had the feeling of all being locked up in our bodies, isolated inside our homes for months and the screen became the only exit door towards the outside. At that moment, something changed, also because during the countless virtual conferences, the image of ourselves was always there, as if we were perennially looking at ourselves in a mirror. This sensation of being constantly in front of our own image, the screen or the mirror, as a threshold to the world, worried and fascinated me. Something big was happening and I got the desire to write the first pages of this project. We did a lot of research, a lot of consulting with academics, experts, philosophers, a lot of exploration inside the worlds and communities related to VR. Even though new technologies are at the centre of the narrative, the film is predominantly focused on human beings, on ecology because what interests me is understanding what is happening in our lives.

In your film, the concept of reality is deconstructed through the film medium. What more does the cinema offer, according to you, compared to other forms of artistic expression, to talk about the society in which we live?
I started working in cinema without having studied it concretely. My background was more related to research. My previous film, Normal [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], was already an essay film. There is never a linear narrative in my films. What interests me isn’t to tell a story, but rather to use the cinematic medium to explore ideas. Unlike an academic kind of critical analysis, for example, cinema allows me to express my ideas through suggestions and images. I like that cinema allows me to explore the world but in a poetic way, through suggestions and associations of images.

In your previous work, you often and willingly observe the world with a feminist and queer gaze. Where does this interest in alternative, oblique, anti-normative narratives come from?
VR chat is a reality that I didn’t know, a platform inside VR where you can create truly queer worlds. There, worlds without limits, totally inclusive, can be created, where genders don’t exist and where people, through their avatars, can be what they feel they really are. This mental opening, the possibility of freely choosing one’s own gender identity is, for the people I have met, not only strongly liberating but also healing. The two girls, who then became the protagonists of this virtual space, understood they were transgender MtF people thanks to virtual reality, thanks to the fact of realising virtually how comfortable they were in a body defined as “feminine”. The possibility of configuring one’s own aspect, one’s own body, has had a very strong impact also on their mental health. In this virtual world, oppressed communities find spaces of expression, a way of existing.

In your film, digital technologies are at once a free space and dangerous prisons from which it is hard to escape; what is your point of view on this? Is there still hope?
It’s an interesting question because, for me, the film has been a journey of discovery for a reality that I didn’t know yet. On the one hand, there is this very liberating aspect related to VR, an escape from reality that nevertheless allows you to take back control of your own life, that offers a feeling of empowerment, and on the other hand, we find the digital technology detox clinic. These are two realities that co-exist. If on the one hand, new technologies have a healing side, on the other we see the pathology. Technology is simply a tool that is never in itself positive or negative, it all depends on the use that each person makes of it and this says a lot about society as a whole. The problem isn’t so much the technology in itself but the direction that our society has taken, this turbo-capitalism that doesn’t respect the planet and people. We are in an era that seems to be galloping towards the apocalypse.

(Translated from Italian)