“Vittoria”, interview with directors Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman

At the 81th Venice Film Festival, Fred Film Radio interviewed Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman, directors of “Vittoria”, a movie presented in the Orizzonti Extra section. A story based on true events about a woman, Jasmine, who desires to adopt a baby girl.

Torre Annunziata and its people

After “Butterfly“ and “Californie“ directors Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman return with a new documentary, “Vittoria”. But the starting point is always the same: Torre Annunziata. What is so powerful about this place? “It’s a question we often get, and it’s a question we often ask ourselves. ‘Why this place?’. We went to Torre Annunziata to make our first film, but we didn’t expect to make a film after that, okay? Now, years later, we have a trilogy. But it’s not like we decided to make all the films there. And we didn’t even make our decisions based on the themes of the film and the story itself, but it’s because of the people we met there”.

The approach

Also in “Vittoria” Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman return to work with non-professional actors. Do they consider themselves neo-realist directors? “We come from spending 15 years doing documentaries before we started to do film. It’s our approach. I think it was a kind of natural evolution from documentary into this kind of cinema. And actually, that’s what we like. We like real people, we like to work with real people, we like to work with a small crew. These are all things that are part of the narrative, so it’s true that it’s not like a decision that was talked about before, but it’s natural for us”.

A story of adoption from a different point of view

The film tells a story of adoption from a new point of view. The directors do not focus on the arrival of the child in a new family unit, but on what happens before, between waiting and bureaucracy. “When we heard Marilena- who’s Jasmine in the film – and her story, it had a big impact on us. We started researching immediately the films that exist on adoption. And the majority of them are either when the child arrives in the family and how it changes the dynamics or it could be an adopted child who tries to go in search of their cultural roots or their biological parents. We really couldn’t find much about the process that happened before. We didn’t know anything about this world, and so we had to learn a lot. But I think, on the bigger level, what really attracted us the most to the story wasn’t the adoption itself. It was the idea of one woman having an idea that wasn’t really logical. It was considered irrational by many people, and she was considered crazy by friends and family. But she had the desire to follow this instinct”.

Plot