Halfway through the 81st Venice Film Festival, Italian director Giovanni Tortorici ranks among the event’s most promising first discoveries in 2024. The Palermo-born filmmaker, who spent several years as an assistant and apprentice to the great Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino, premiered his first feature film Nineteen Friday on the Lido. The film is in competition in the festival’s Horizons section, which focuses on promising works by new and established directors.
A coming-of-age film that avoids all the familiar clichés of the genre, Nineteen is a brutally honest portrait of what it feels like to be 19, full of disparate desires, intellectually ambitious and completely lost. The film tells the story of Leonardo Gravina, a teenager played by Manfredi Marini, a young man who both blossoms and collapses after making the sudden decision to abandon his business studies in London for a literature degree in Siena, where he becomes increasingly obsessed with obscure 19th-century Italian authors. Wandering the winding streets and musty apartments of the medieval Tuscan town, Leonardo becomes the quintessential teenage romantic, at once brimming with youthful promise and consumed by adolescent alienation.
In an admiring review, The Hollywood Reporter Critic Jordan Mintzer wrote: “The film’s complete abandonment of plot will distract viewers looking for some kind of guiding principle or shape to Leonardo’s life, but it’s also what makes Nineteen seems more real than many films that are supposed to be about today’s youth. In a way, Tortorici continues a tradition of Italian art cinema, especially that of Fellini The Vitelloni and Pasolini Beggarabout disillusioned young people who are part of a lost generation, although Leonardo does not seem to belong to any group other than his own.
THR connected with Tortorici to discuss the making of Nineteen and how he resurrects his own painful passage through youth.
How do you summarize? NineteenWhat is the premise of ‘and your cinematic approach to it?
It’s about the experience of being 19. But over the course of his trajectory in the film, the protagonist and his personality don’t evolve much. At the end of the film, he’s pretty much the same as he was at the beginning. So it’s a little different from other coming-of-age stories. The idea came from my own experience. I was very curious to explore some of the things I had experienced, things that hadn’t had much impact. I wanted to try a form of storytelling that describes small, everyday things – things that are a symptom of a way of being.
Did you like it because it seemed more realistic than the usual coming-of-age clichés?
Yes, I just tried to be authentic to what I experienced, to be as close to life as possible. I wasn’t trying to follow any narrative pattern at all.
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