Paola Pedrazzini is the general manager of Fondazione Fare Cinema and art director at Bottega XNL. She is in Venice to present Welcome to Paradise, a short movie directed by Leonardo Di Costanzo produced as part of the 2022 edition of training programme Corso di Alta Formazione Cinematografica Bottega XNL – Fare Cinema.
Bottega – shop, in Italian – XNL is a new, important player in the filmmaking industry.
Bottega XNL has been created and designed as a place where master filmmakers can pass on their knowledge and their experience to the younger generations, to mentees who are willing to turn this art in a real profession. This is the way it used to be done in Renaissance-era botteghe, places where education happens in the making of the art, in being part of the creative process. Together, we are a place where pupils, teachers, and art can grow together, with pupils in particular learning techniques and secrets. Out project is the continuation of the Centro di Alta Formazione Cinematografica of Fondazione Fare Cinema, once established by Marco Bellocchio in 1995. Bellocchio has always been a proponent of the learning-by-doing system in film education. He is also a protagonist in this new cultural challenge, which now doubles its efforts in high education with a theatre programme: Fare Teatro. I met Bellocchio in the early 2000s and together, we worked to found an association that eventually became the Foundation.
The goal of Fondazione Fare Cinema is in the name itself: to make film, to systematize the work we have been doing over the year. Our students come from the most prestigious film academies, take an entrance test, and produce a short movie over the summer. In simpler terms, it is a sort of doctorate programme.
Produced by Mompracem and RAI Cinema, the short movie tells the story of Nadia, a lonely, diffident girl who wears an eyepatch. As she walks by the riverbank looking for adventure in the company of some stray cats, she notices a mistreated boy who has been locked up in a shed ...
Who are the bottega masters?
The first two great maestros we involved are filmmaker Leonardo Di Costanzo and theatre director, author, and actor Marco Baliani. The two joined enthusiastically our programme and loved opening their bottega with us. They share the finest sensitivity in the way they work with their actors and their sets. All film produced at Bottega XNL – Fare Cinema premiered at the Bobbio Film Festival, while all shows created at Bottega XNL – Fare Teatro have been staged at the Veleia Archaeological Site as part of their ancient theatre programme.
Tell us more about the contribution of Leonardo Di Costanzo, who is in Venice currently with his latest film, Welcome to Paradise.
The screening of Di Costanzo’s short film, which is also part of our programme, goes to show just how established our identity is. Our finals are not merely an end-of-semester recital, but a real work of art and authorship that our students contributed to. I would like to stress the importance of the added value of the Welcome to Paradise project – it multiplied educational projects for local youth, some of whom were hired as extras, and for students of other programmes, such as a former screenwriting student of ours.
What is curious is that, in this hyper-technological world we live in, you offer a Renaissance-era educational programme, one that centres fully on the individual and their ideas, and above all their ability to turn them into concrete, almost manual work.
There once was more attention given to language and words, but it was also much harder, factually, to technically produce the motion picture. Today, any kid with a cell phone in hand can make any film he wants, however, what is lacking is the ability to ‘picture the essence’. You feel something is missing – meaning, maybe, or sense. That’s why, at the Bottega, the person is at the centre, at the very heart of each project.
