Gianluca Vassallo presents the film The chair

"There is a moment in everyone's life when adulthood becomes solid. It so happens that self-awareness, as the sum of limitations, talents, vulnerabilities and certainties, fully manifests itself legitimizing our role in the world", explains Gianluca Vassallo.

"It is a potentially extraordinary moment which, however, often coincides with the observation of a growing fragility of our loved ones. In my case, my father, the man to whom I owe my tireless dedication to work , has transformed in a few years from a being that I have always imagined very tall, strong, brilliant, into a small, bent man, afflicted by pain and therefore unable to express himself at the height of his thought.

Parkinson's transformed him, trapping his mind in a body that no longer fully responds. His transformation made me think about the theme of moral inheritance, a theme that crosses society both on an individual, strictly private level, and on one that is of collective interest.

The film The Chair was born like this, as an urgent attempt to put order to private emotions and thoughts about the world, looking for a simple answer to a complex question: which is mine, intimate, and ours , collective, responsibility in front of a legacy?"

The plot of the film

"Pietro looks for his brother ten years after a deep fracture in their relationship to contend with the only thing that his father left them as an inheritance: a chair. The chair is together the simplest object of every life and metaphor of the throne, if it is only one left by a father.

In this story the chair becomes the cross of Peter, which will cross 'the summer of the devil', dragging it like Christ along the Way of the Cross. Peter like Christ, like a civil, political, poetic Christ, will stop 14 times, to encounter chance and his conscience, on his way to the truth".

Why Gianluca Vassallo chose the Chair 1 by Enzo Mari

"Mari's Chair 1 I met thanks to Maurizio Bosa, architect and teacher Ied with whom I often share projects, ideas of the world and reflections (as far as mine are worth) on design.

He told me about it a few years ago, and while I was writing the story I thought that the chair was the perfect metaphorical object: a project that is the result of political and poetic thought, which puts everyone in a position to build a object of use, through simple things. A bit of a metaphor for what fathers should teach their children".

What is cinema of necessity

"I like to call 'cinema of necessity' that tried-and-tested production process which, although tiring because it has no departments and no hierarchies, becomes an added creative level, forcing us to a relationship with reality that changes the writing in progress, with the stumbling blocks that would have had no place in an ordinary production.

The power and the 'barrel' bring the dialectic of art into the body of a cultural consumer good.

Cinema of necessity because is the need to see history live, as close as possible to its writing, to the private and political, intimate and collective tension that generated it, so that it is still understandable to the public the reading of certain statements on contemporaneity that ordinary production made up of ministries, public money, producers and who knows how many other levels, would make it too distant to be present, and too present to be history".

The self-designed and self-produced film like Enzo Mari's chair

"The film The Chair will be ready and visible to those who supported it, three months after the first written word. And if it has the attention and interest of the distributions, it will touch anyone who wants to meet it with the same speed.

I wrote this film in 15 days, I shot it with the economies of my company, with the support of the Sardinia Film Commission and with the contribution of all those who have joined the fundraising which is still active at address whiteboxstudio.it/lasedia.

The cinema of necessity is basically the answer as a musician, as a photographer, (touch & note / snap & photo) to the need to tell something, it is the rendering of the primacy of beauty to the urgency of meaning, it is to do with what you have, with what you can, because history asks you, who asks you who you are at the moment when history passes through you.

This is the way I like to make films, with few and with little (of course, better not so little) and without waiting, without ministries, without regions, without state. Governed and supported by the urgency and grace that only unconsciousness or maturity can bring you ".

How and where the film was shot

"The film was shot in Sardinia, between San Teodoro, Budoni and Azzanì, a fraction of Loiri Porto San Paolo.

It was shot with little means and everyone's great dedication to history, starting with the protagonist, Michele Sarti, whom I consider my Snout, an actor endowed with fragility and power constantly lit, and a face engraved and engraved on the eyes of the beholder.

The cast is also composed of Renzo Cugis, Bianca Maria Lai, Giuseppe Boy, Noemi Medas, Tiziano Polese, Tiziana Troja (also assistant director and extraordinary acting coach), Matteo Nicoletta, Michela Sale Musio, Andrea Sestini , Santiago Zarra and Angelo Zedda.

For once I gave up the writing of the music, which was composed by Tanake, in a state of grace, while L a Sedia 1 was made by the craftsman Pietro Fois of Handicraft and Design, a carpentry that in recent years has combined experimentation with tradition.

The film was produced by Maddalena Satta for White Box Studio and by Tiziana Troja and Michela Sale Musio for Lucido Sottile, and without the help of my (now) historical collaborators, Roberto Verbena and Francesco Mannironi, it would have been impossible to realize this little necessary madness".