During the preparation of "Leonora Addio", for more than two years, Vittorio, to whom the film is dedicated, was no longer physically at her side.

But "he was with me," said Paolo Taviani, patriarch of Italian cinema, in an interview with AFP.

The idea for certain parts of this film-collage, imbued with the idea of ​​death and the traces that the artists leave behind them, moreover germinated in the minds of the two brothers well before Vittorio's death.

This is the case of the chapter adapting a short story, "Il Chiodo", by the great Italian playwright of the beginning of the 20th century, and Nobel Prize for Literature, Luigi Pirandello, says Paolo Taviani.

Written shortly before the author's death in 1936, it tells the story of a little Sicilian who must follow his father to New York, retains an intimate wound and ends up in a fit of madness by killing a child.

This adaptation, shot in color, is preceded by Paolo with a black and white fable on the transfer of the ashes of Luigi Pirandello, from Rome to Sicily, fifteen years after his death.

An "absurd journey" according to Paolo, which sets the tone for a "complex film, both sad and not sad".

"I did everything I could to show sad and grotesque situations, as well as love stories," he adds.

"The tree will grow again"

These stories feature "such narrative richness, they're beyond reality, it's a mixture of fact and invention, confusing as life can be during this pandemic," he continued. .

"Vittorio and I decided to make films when I was 16 and he was 18, seeing + Païsa + by Rosselini", he confides.

“We then understood that films could change lives and reveal to us who we really were”.

Vittorio (l) and Paolo Taviani during the presentation of their film "Caesar Must Die" Golden Bear in Berlin, Rome on February 29, 2012 TIZIANA FABI AFP/Archives

"Years later, we won the Palme d'Or for Padre Padrone (1977), handed over to Rosselini, and it was like a circle closing," says the man who also won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes ("The Night of San Lorenzo", 1982) and the Golden Bear in Berlin ("César must die", 2012), with his brother.

The film is also a tribute to a tutelary figure of Italian cinema in the golden age of neorealism, with on-screen quotations from fictional film clips to evoke the torments of the post-war period. in Italy.

"This golden age of Italian cinema was a bit like the Renaissance, full of extraordinary artists in their heyday, like Visconti, Fellini," he says.

A glorious period gone?

"It's like a tree that has roots, and those roots are still there even though the wind has picked up and branches have fallen," he replies.

"They are powerful and strong and if young people find money to make films, the tree will grow again".

© 2022 AFP