FRANCE, ITALY

CASABLANCA

2023 – DCP – color – 62’

Direction: Adriano Valerio 

Cinematography: Diego Romero Suarez-Llanos, Jonathan Ricquebourg

Editing: Andrea Maguolo, Alice Roffinengo

Music & Sound: Enrico Ascoli

With: Fouad Miftah, Daniela Brandi

Producers: Lionel Massol, Giulia Achilli, Marco Alessi

Production: Films Grand Huit, Dugong Films in association with Sayonara Film, F Comme Film, Salt For Sugar

synopsis

Fouad, son of the Imam of a popular neighborhood in Casablanca, has been clandestine in Italy for ten years, awaiting medicaltreatment. Daniela, grew up in an upper middle-class family of esotericists from Apulia. A former drug addict, she lives in greatloneliness.

They meet by chance in Umbria and both of them claim without hesitation that the other saved their life. This is the beginning of a relationship filled with love that helps them heal. Together they live in a daily beauty of the ordinary to the slowrhythm of seasons and daily rituals, a suspended place that dances in time.

Yet, over the years, Fouad gets tired of waiting for his Visa, exhausted by an environment he feels he will never belong to.

Will he return to Casablanca, even if this means not being with Daniela anymore?

director’s statement

“I met Fouad in a bar in Gubbio in 2016, he told me his story and I immediately felt the desire to make a documentary about him.

I filmed him and Daniela from 2016 till 2022, between Umbria, Paris and Casablanca, trying to capture the most salient moments of their relationship, but also the depth of their souls,all the nuances of the suffering, humor and poetry that marked their lives.

But how does time act on their existences? And how does it act in the cinematic narrative?

I’ve tried to create a narrative and emotional flow that, regardless of time, would be able to reconstruct the exceptional nature of their relationship. Years and months blur together in a creative process that, freeing the story from its chronology, crystallizes its feelings. (TAGLIARE IN CASO DI BISOGNO)

Casablanca is a love story between two people who have built an atypical family, an intimacy inwhich each manages, thanks to the other, to free themselves from society’s exclusion.”

festival

2023 Mostra di Venezia –  Author’s Days