Rue Garibaldi
Categoria PerSo Cinema Italiano

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT 

“It bothers me, it looks like a speed camera,” says Ines, who has little desire to be filmed. We have been stationary in this house for days, maybe weeks already, and although everything seems still, there is something elusive happening every day. Effectively you are right, it is a kind of pursuit: ever since I met Ines and Rafik, this absolute, indefinable couple, I have felt a thunderbolt for their lives, incandescent matter full of layering, trajectories and signs of the present, at the same time suspended and motionless in this house, in a long transient interval toward something to come. Is it possible to record something in constant motion, even in stasis?

This is the first time I have visited. On the train, I listen again to Ines’ voice. She has a Sicilian accent, a dark sound, still in her teens. I imagine she is on her way home after being at the market in Villeneuve Saint-Georges; I can hear the sound of planes landing at Orly, so loud it almost covers her voice. “I agreed to leave on a Tuesday in September, and on Friday I was already here,” she says: in this desolate banlieue, half an hour from the city. She is not yet 20 years old and already has a debt of 20,000 euros on her shoulders: her uncle fronted her for a transportation company and then disappeared. She has not even had time to realize it, and already she has had to take a new job, for an Italian company. She is restless, tired; she tells me her story in a long voice message, recorded during the night. Her voice, on the phone, retains only the most essential frequencies, and I tell myself that this primitive, angular aspect should also be the path of the film, as I walk up to the house on Rue Garibaldi. From here we never leave, or almost never. The outside world enters through the windows, through the phones, through the memories he shares only with his brother Rafik, in an absolute relationship. At seventeen he dreamed of being an airplane pilot, had studied for it, but then found he could not afford the license. “So I became a driver,” he tells me, smiling in the mirror as he puts on a new shirt for a new shift. After spending a year working nights for Uber, sleeping in his car, the city to him is just a dark set of bright spots, a dizziness. He likes to talk about himself, to show off: it’s no coincidence that before he found himself here he was a young up-and-comer in the Italian Socialist Party in Vittoria; he shows me how he spoke to the square before the elections. He felt alive, secure. Now everything is more confused, there is no line to follow but only ideas in all directions: a night spent serving sandwiches in a fast-food restaurant; the plan to return to Tunisia, find the family again; accumulate money by trading; buy a new car.

As I walk around, as I live with them, I wonder where this film is going, what path it will take. Their existences are constantly crossed by the most disparate trajectories: questions of work, of precariousness, of identity, of a search for meaning. They are brothers, lovers, a family, they are still teenagers and already adults, sometimes almost children. I try to be ready, but I am at the mercy of the unexpected; I look for the right distance. Boundaries elude me, but I cannot stop observing these two brothers, participating in their humanity, in this moment of passage that is laboriously taking place. I feel that their story also becomes mine, that I am there listening to them. Meanwhile, the outside world is as if vanished: outside it may still be night, we may see the sea, or a desert that continues to grow.