After its release at the cinema on June 15th 2022 and a long tour in Italian cinemas until March 2023, the film arrives in streaming on demand on CHILI from August 3rd 2023
“Something that disturbs the mind and remains there for an unlimited time”, this is the definition of “Mindemic”, the neologism chosen as the title of Giovanni Basso’s first work, which sees the actor Giorgio Colangeli as the protagonist.
A film that honors the creativity of Italian independent cinema, produced by Magnet Films and distributed by Azimut Distribution.
‘Mindemic’, Giovanni Basso and his “Opera Zero”
Nino Fontana writes: “I live not by living, but by cinema I survive”. We know that the aphorism – Karl Kraus docet – never coincides with the truth; either it is a half truth or a truth and a half. And this can happen even when the years spent reaching the desired heights are many and act like the sea air, which coats everything it touches with a layer of rust. And it can stifle its vitality, as when the air is salty. Sometimes, however, unexpected calls arrive, even if peremptory.
That’s what happens to Nino, a seventy-year-old director who has a minor career behind him. He lives isolated in his apartment, the reality that surrounds him, a world in which something happened that prompted the production of films to be interrupted, is seen by a man who survives without having any aim, no goal.
For this reason, when after many years Nino receives a call from his historic producer Fredo, he accepts the proposal, albeit absurd, to write a film in just three days.
Nino begins to write the text using his beloved typewriter, an Olivetti Letter 32. Deciding to make an epic war film, to find support in the drafting he tries to contact his historical collaborators. The screenwriter De Paoli, who refuses the job, and the actor Giovanni Marino, who in turn refuses the role that Nino offers him.
Nino then begins to stage the pages he is writing himself at home, interpreting all the characters in the film by himself: a group of soldiers who during an unspecified war try to save a mysterious woman. Nino also receives a visit at the home of a woman, an escort who is identical to the wife who left him years earlier and with whom he is still in love.
Proceeding with the writing, Nino gets lost in an artistic and personal delirium, no longer being able to distinguish between truth and fiction.
“I wrote this story – says the author and director Giovanni Basso – with the idea of bringing to the big screen an extreme, unique character who could embody the worries, delusions and anxieties of an uncertain present and future ”. And he adds: “I developed the character of Nino thinking of a single actor, Giorgio Colangeli, to whom I sent the script thinking it would be rejected. Not even 24 hours later Giorgio phoned me saying that he wanted to make the film. Mindemic (Opera Zero) was born that day”.
To the film from body and soul Giorgio Colangeliwhich interprets the Nino character: here for the first time in his formidable career he is the absolute protagonist of a fiction feature film. As it is known, Giorgio Colangeli he knows the entire Divine Comedy by heart, which he declaimed on several occasions, even on the Rome ring road, on Dan Tuesday.
He can be tragic, comic, cynical, desperate, grotesque: always as a great leading actor.
As for the secondary roles, Basso has decided to rely on lesser-known but highly charismatic faces, such as Rosanna Gentili in the role of Nino’s escort/wife, Roberto Andreucci in the role of the screenwriter De Paolis and Paolo Gasparini in the role of the superficial actor Giovanni Marine.
For the choice of music instead, everything is due to the discovery of a film entitled The Sexual Revolution by Riccardo Ghione, from 1968, whose music was composed by maestro Teo Usuelli. Having fallen in love with the soundtrack composed for this film, Basso decided to acquire the rights and use it for Mindemic (Opera Zero), as he fully hit what he had been looking for for some time.
The movie was shot entirely in 4K with an iPhone 8+ phone fitted with an American anamorphic lens adapted to the mobile sensor.
Mindemic (Opera Zero) was released in Italian theaters on June 15, 2022. In September 2022 it was included in the list of 12 Italian films that were running for nomination at the Oscars 2023. It remained in Italian theaters until March 2023, when won as best Italian film at the Los Angeles Italia – Film & Art Fest.
Starting from August 3, 2023 it will be available in streaming on demand only on the CHILI platform.
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