September

Production
Groenlandia
InHOUSE POST
Release
2019
Category
Shorts
Cast
  • Margherita Rebeggiani
  • Sergio Luca Nozzoli
  • Arianna Ascoli
Plot

Maria and Sergio are classmates but have never talked much. After summer break Maria for noticed by Cristian for the first time, a guy she has been madly infatuated with over a year.

Cristian sends Sergio to ask her to meet and sleep together. It is a blunt and unromantic proposal but the girl, faced with her crush asking her such a thing, immediately accepts. She soon panics: not having had any experience like that she is uncertain what will happen and what she will have to do. She is terrified of appearing ridiculous and not even Simona, her best friend, can comfort her. Feeling lonely she prefers staying on her own. Thus, when Sergio understands Maria’s distress, he offers to help her.

The two of them spend the entire afternoon together to prepare Maria for the “task” discovering a complicity and delight in being together that they had never felt.

Screenplay by Giulia Louise Steigerwalt

An emotional education
taking place in silence.

Director's note

The theme of this story might seem to be that of sex education. In reality, it is about something else for me. On paper, in words and gestures, in facts. Maria and Sergio set about analysing every detail of the undertaking the girl is preparing herself for: her first time. But while they try to clarify the “mechanics”, the pair soon discover what it means to actually feel good with someone, to have a sense of complicity and to be yourself, free of filters, being your true self for better or worse. It is an emotional education that takes place in silence while pursuing something that is supposed to be important but perhaps at the end of the day, isn’t really. This is why I have always liked and felt tenderness for the world of adolescence. Finding yourself faced with huge unknown changes and with the sensation of having to set a tone, to create something very clumsy and unknowingly ironic. As far as sexuality is concerned, today I find myself more and more often in stories about young people who compared to the past, trace a story that is sometimes rawer, jaded and direct. Even so the emotion is still the same. That’s why I enjoy telling the story of the friction between a reality in which there are no more mysteries, with the social pressure which requires being capable of all that and feelings the same as the past, which exist and which no-one can really explain. This story comes out of the confrontation between these two realities but at the end it is most contradictory romanticism which prevails and in a somewhat ironic way.