Amidst the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of Italian immigration In Brazil, a film spoken partially in Talian, a language born from the arrival of immigrants from the “Belpaese” to the South region in the 3th century, hits the country's cinemas this Thursday (19).
“Until the music “pare”, a co-production between Brazil and Italy directed by the filmmaker Cristiane Oliveira from Rio Grande do Sul, tells the story of the couple Alfredo (Hugo Lorensatti) and Chiara (Cibele Tedesco), matriarch of an Italian-descendant family who, after the last child left home, decides to accompany her husband on his travels as a salesman in the bars of Serra Gaúcha. However, a turtle and decks of cards will put more than 50 years of life together to the test.
“Many people in the [Italian] community and those who work to safeguard the Talian language are very moved to see this language, which is very common in the interior, come to the big screen in a family drama,” Oliveira said in an interview with ANSA. The film won him the award for best director at the last edition of the Bergamo Film Meeting.
“I began developing the script based on questions I asked myself about the limits of our tolerance, in parallel with the scenario of scandals in national politics. This led me to question our daily conditions,” he added.
The film is also inspired by the story of a friend whose family “was very worried when they discovered that her grandfather, a man above suspicion, a businessman, was selling a certain product without an invoice”.
From this, Oliveira and screenwriter Gustavo Galvão set out to do research in Serra Gaúcha and discovered that many people in the protagonists' age group spoke Talian.
“It was very enriching to come into contact with this culture, and it made me really want to make this anthropological record in the film, to have this musicality,” said the filmmaker.
The cast of “Until the music “pare” features Brazilian actress Elisa Volpatto and Italian actor Nicolas Vaporidis, as well as local talents who already had a facility with the language, such as Tedesco and Lorensatti, members of the Miseri Coloni theater group, a traditional company from Caxias do Sul that has been performing in Talian since the 1980s.
But to deal with the improvisations that arose on set, Oliveira revealed that he had the help of consultants, including Talian training teachers from Unicentro in Paraná, to guarantee “the work of representing this culture”. (HANDLE)
