Guadagnino, among the film’s producers with Frenesy, calls him a ‘genialoid’. Giovanni Tortorici makes his Horizons debut with his first feature, Nineteen.
The film is an autobiographical coming-of-age story that explores the life of Leonardo and his experiences as a student. How much of Leonardo is in Giovanni Tortorici?
There’s a lot of my own experiences and quirks that I lived through as an out-of-town student. At nineteen, I had many problems, but that’s something that many young people of that age share, and it’s part of the human experience at any age.
An autobiographical and generational film. A nineteen-year-old from Palermo, who moved to London to study economics, decides to return to start a new academic journey in Siena, enrolling in the Faculty of Letters. This return journey is both introspective and exploratory, wher...
In the past, you assisted in the production of some of Luca Guadagnino’s films, and now he’s producing your film. Is there an aesthetic connection as well as a production one?
I greatly admire and learn from Guadagnino’s aesthetics, but we are very different.
The majority of the film was shot on the streets and in private apartments in Siena, rather than on an artificial set. What led you to make this decision?
I was seeking authenticity, and for me, the film was essentially based on that and on places I knew very well. For example, the apartment where Leonardo stays with the two roommates in Siena is the same one I lived in as a student in Siena.
