Born in Rome, 1984, Enrico Maria Artale made his Venice debut in 2013 with Il terzo tempo, Premio Pasinetti Opera Prima. He returns to Orizzonti with El Paraíso, a drama about an intense mother-and-son relationship permeated with inner darkness but bathed in color.
What were your goals as a filmmaker as you were working on El Paraíso?
It all started with a personal and artistic journey that began a few years ago, back when I was working on the editing of my documentary Saro, a first-person film about the first and only time I met my father, when I was twenty-five. As I was processing the events, I realized what I really was delving into was my relationship with my mother, more than I had ever done before. This discovery generated a love so strong that I wanted it to enter the film I had just started writing, until it made it to its core.
Julio is almost forty and still lives at home with his mother in a house by the river, not far from Rome. The mother is a strong, determined woman who fled Colombia when she was young and pregnant. Julio and his mother’s relationship is complex, symbiotic, deep, and morbid. ...
The setting of the movie has a very particular importance.
I asked my scenographer to design and build an existing home as if we were in a studio. I wanted to be free to move about the way we wanted. The inner darkness that is apparent in the story relates continuously to a scenario that is quite unlike it: an imaginary, colourful corner of South America. All pertains to the description of a rich emotional world, animated by that aching liveliness that I learned from Gabriel García Márquez’s novels.
How did you choose your cast?
I needed an identity that could interpret an aching, longing feeling for the city of Rome, and the vitality we may associate with Colombia. That’s what guided my choice. None of the four protagonists spoke both languages, Italian and Spanish, which meant that each of them had to find a way to express themselves and a degree of hybridization they were comfortable with so that I could play with their misunderstandings and channel into a something fluid and flowing.
