Edited by Silvia Tarquini
After premiering at the Rome Film Festival, Arsa, by the artistic duo Masbedo (Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni) is released in theaters on April 24. The film recounts the wild life of the very young Arsa (Gala Zohar Martinucci) on the island of Stromboli, separated from society and immersed in nature. Behind this loneliness is the loss of her father (Lino Musella), who returns to her in dreams and visions in a constant and painful attempt to process. Arsa communicates with the children, who perhaps experience similar solitudes on those vacation beaches. A young man on vacation (Jacopo Olmo Antinori), also marked by loss, tries to approach her, but it will be another, on a mythical plane, the important encounter for Arsa. The film is written by Masbedo together with Giorgio Vasta, photographed by Gherardo Gossi, edited by Jacopo Quadri, music by Davide Tomat and G.U.P Alcaro, produced by Eolo Film Productions, Alcion, Rai Cinema.
How did you meet the artistic duo of Masbedo (Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni)? Had you already collaborated with them before Arsa?
I have known Nicolo and Iacopo for about 20 years. They contacted me to consult on the color-correction of one of their projects. There was immediately a strong connection, human and professional, and since then we have worked together on several occasions in experiences that were very stimulating for me. We were united by a strongly visual approach to storytelling. The Masbedo use improvisation as a creative path, driven by a narrative urgency more related to on-set intuition than to a rigid structure, which ties in well with my experience in documentary filmmaking, where speed and operator sensitivity are a fundamental. Over time, the collaboration also became a friendship. I participated in their first feature film, The Lack, a film that mixed video art with cinematic storytelling in a very original way. It was structured as a series of dreams stitched together, one after the other. I was in charge of some scenes in Iceland and on the soundstage at Cinecittà . It was their first real approach to feature films, and we managed to combine moments of a more documentary nature – very visual – with performances conceived and staged directly on location. Working with them always stimulates me to reflect and experiment on the creation of the image outside the canons of classical storytelling. They start from suggestions, visions, and let the narrative emerge little by little, organically. And this was precisely the path we followed for Arsa. This narrative freedom, “other” form of narrative construction, is one of the characteristics that most impressed and influenced me in my work on the images of this film.
Masbedo have often experimented with mixing different languages: performance as well as exhibitions and video installations. Lately they have stated that they feel closer and closer to cinema and the relationship between cinema and contemporary art. Did you perhaps play a role in this rapprochement or is it an autonomous path of theirs that also involved you?
They have always had a strong passion for film. Since our first meeting, the strongest point of contact has been this shared love. Niccolò and Iacopo are both deeply connected to the language of film, like blood running through their veins Over the years they have produced several works that testify to this. They dedicated a work to Antonioni, and, among others, one of their most recent projects, the medium-length film Pantelleria deals with cinema and war. A very powerful work made a few months before the outbreak of war in Ukraine. It is impressive how some artists manage to intercept certain tensions in advance. The work reflects on how war documentation is often constructed and manipulated. I remember seeing it for the first time at the Venice Art Biennale, where it was projected in a very special format: a projection twenty meters long and two meters high, which was extremely impressive. The screenplay is signed by Giorgio Vasta, the same author who wrote Arsa.
Besides the one with Masbedo, have you had any other collaborations in contemporary art?
Yes, different experiences. Aside from working in documentary film-which often led me to document exhibitions and projects related to the art world-I’ve always had a passion for art, it’s a family legacy. Before working with Masbedo, I had collaborated with Lara Favaretto on a video installation, The Earth is Too Big. It is not my main field of work but I am always curious to vary my approach to image. I have worked in advertising, in theater, in production contexts also very different from fictional cinema or television seriality. Thanks to all these experiences I have developed a transversal gaze, which influences the deep connection with Masbedo.
Let us turn, then, to Arsa. How did you get involved in the project and how were you introduced to the film? Was there a script?
I was involved in the two directors’ most complex projects, those that required more technical or logistical articulation. In traditional cinema, you work from a starting script, with a director who has a precise vision and actors playing a previously written story. They, on the other hand, work more performatively, and again we started from a visual outline, with a script that grew over time. Arsa allowed me to express aspects of my work that rarely emerge in pure fiction projects. Talking about it with you, I become more aware of an aspect that I had never fully considered: my different experiences have somehow merged and synthesized in projects like Arsa or The Lack. The ability to combine different registers-the freedom and improvisation required by documentary and the construction of fiction-is definitely one of the strongest points of contact that I share with Masbedo.
Arsa is a film in which the image dominates over the word. There are many sequences of pure observation, such as when the protagonist looks through binoculars at the beach, the children, the families, or the immigrant selling life jackets… Or that scene where, on the boat, the little girl loses her toy warrior, which falls into the sea: a dramatic moment for the little girl, in which the voices, the words, disappear and only the image and the music remain, and in this way the scene becomes really profound. These are sequences in which the film enters a hypnotic dimension, parallel to that of the more directly dreamlike sequences, breaking free from realism and common cinematic language. This gives the image enormous power. And that is precisely why your (masterful) presence as cinematographer I think was relevant in this film. Were you aware from the beginning of this essentially visual approach? Or is it something that emerged during the course of the filming?
The Masbedo involved me for underwater footage that was to complement a work they had started shooting months earlier. Starting from one very strong image: the recovery of an abandoned statue at the bottom of a black sea. Everything started from there, from that gesture turned performance. With the producers-particularly Beatrice Bulgari (Eolo Film Productions) and executive producer Luca Bradamante (third Masbedo)-the idea was born to develop that fragment into something more articulate: to bring the statue together with what would later become the film’s protagonist, Arsa, the very talented Gala Zohar Martinucci. At that point I was called in, to shoot this sequence, which we shot in Rome, in a swimming pool. The encounter between the protagonist and the statue then became the finale of Arsa. From there a real work in progress began. Under the creative impetus of Masbedo and Beatrice, the project developed gradually, over the course of a year. Filming began in a swimming pool in March 2023 and ended in February 2024 on a rainy night in a cane field, through productive moments spread over time. This was the first time I had worked on a fiction film in such a wide time frame. We had already shot in blocks in the previous The Lack, but here the processing was even more dilated, with all the complexities involved. In the meantime, I worked on other projects-Santo cielo by Francesco Amato, with Ficarra and Picone, and Marconi by Lucio Pellegrini-but Arsa was a constant presence, a thought that accompanied me for more than a year. Thanks to this approach to work, made up of daily creative meetings, I was also able to contribute to the visual elaboration of the film, proposing images that later became part of the story. One in particular, among others, has remained in my heart: the night ride of the fireflies. It was born right there, on a night in the reedbed between Ginostra and Stromboli, from an idea I pitched to the filmmakers and which they instantly accepted.
How did it go from the pool in Rome to Stromboli?
Keep in mind that initially the idea was to set the film in a “non-place.” There was, originally, no intention to show the island and the volcano. But, over time, as the story took shape during filming, the island ended up imposing itself, almost naturally. In fact, I would say it became a real character. The images that Masbedo had in their eyes led us to the story becoming the tale of a double loss of the father figure. From a production point of view, it was a very complex film. After a long search for locations in Sicily, already the stage for many of the directors’ works, it was decided to face all the risks that came with the choice of the cane field between Stromboli and Ginostra, a perfect place for the story but logistically very difficult. Reachable only by sea and without electricity, with enormous difficulties both organizational and productive. And all without a predefined script. It was a complex experience, but made possible by the strength and determination of the Masbedo and producer Beatrice Bulgari, who, strong from her experiences in film, was a tenacious supporter of the project.
Stromboli represents nature, in general…
Yes. And the film is also about ecology, the need to preserve and care for our land, and how the connection with nature is unique to our lives.
Coming closer to the images… One thing I seem to notice is that two, or three, visual “moods” coexist in the film. On the one hand, there are very sunny images, with very intense colors, Mediterranean, realistic; on the other hand, the environment of the cane field – where Arsa’s father appears in dreams and visions – has a more muffled, veiled, suspended atmosphere, which probably has something to do with the idea of death. And then there is the dimness, of the house and especially of the silos, almost underground, which the protagonist uses as a kind of laboratory, but which is also a materialization of her inner world. It is a closed, silent and protected place, where light comes filtered, where everything becomes denser, deeper, more intimate.
I’m glad you caught that. In the silo, the photography evokes, rather than shows: it is an environment that lends itself to a more emotional narrative, and the work on the light was crucial to make it alive but at the same time restrained, as if in suspension. The visual variety you speak of was carefully thought out and constructed. The natural light, the strong light of the sun, of the outside day, accompanies the moments of reality and observation of life. Then there are the more intimate and symbolic spaces that I wanted to connote strongly: the reedbed of visions, but also the silo, which is one of the most important places. This play between light and shadow, between outside and inside, between reality and dream, is one of the visual keys to the film. We constantly sought a balance between these various souls, letting them contaminate each other without ever canceling each other out.
You can dwell again on the silos? There really is an additional world there….
The idea of using a silo as Arsa’s shelter was born during the filming: it was an image that Masbedo had in mind and that, in the process, came to the fore. Thanks to the work of the very skilled set designers, Cesare Inzerillo and Nicola Sferruzza, who were able to place it in the reedbed and rearrange it in the studio, in Palermo, to shoot the interiors. A space built from scratch, but one that retained all the visual and symbolic power of that initial intuition.
I would never have imagined that the interior of the silo would be reconstructed-it’s really exciting the way the light filters inside, so powerful and realistic. It gives the idea of a very, very intense outside light, penetrating from multiple points, in different ways. When she goes in there the first time, it’s a very exciting scene, just because of the light.
I’m really glad that this emotion struck you, because the silo one was one of the many challenges of the film. On the soundstage being able to return that feeling of natural, living light was what I was looking for.
The performance of the actress, Gala Zohar Martinucci, is also remarkable: there is a deep continuity with her relationship with nature in that enclosed place, and the theme of loss is amplified and embodied in those abandoned, lost objects that she collects, cares for, collects there. For me that was one of the most intense things in the film. How did you work instead on the character of Arsa’s father, Lino Musella, who is deliberately rather elusive I think?
In the rooms of the foundry where the father works and where Arsa as a child spends long days with him, I tried to bring back the warmth that the paternal world brings, understood not only as the temperature of light, but as an expression of an inner world, of the relationship between father and daughter. I exacerbated this contrast by making sure that the interior-the space the two of them share-was enveloped in warm light tending toward yellow, while the outside is dominated by cool blue tones, which we see through the windows. It was a way of visually isolating that relationship, creating a seemingly protected nest, but not entirely reassuring. Because, yes, the light is warm, but it is not clean: it is a dirty light, shot through with a certain uneasiness. It seemed to me the right way to tell also the character of the father, a character that I felt inwardly macerated also by the work dimension. In some moments elusive, affectionate but marked by a shadow. And this tension also emerges from the fable of the sea monsters he tells the little girl: a sweet narrative, yes, but one shot through with an uneasy undercurrent. It is precisely there, in that emotional subtext, that I tried to intervene with light.
In the foundry, the child’s father suffers the oppression of the “master,” Tommaso Ragno, among other things explicitly connoted as the prevalence of the useful over beauty and poetry… Would you like to say more about the sequences with Lino Musella? Or about this connection with daughter-father?
In some moments the narrative opens to the plane of recollection, in addition to the scenes in the factory, the sequences related to visions , such as the one in which the protagonist meets the cat among the statues in the cemetery. That cat takes her back to her childhood. Arsa is a film that does not offer immediate and unambiguous interpretations, on the contrary: it asks the viewer to activate himself, to find his own references, to recognize in the flow of images something that also speaks to his own unconscious. I tried to link that moment with another central scene: the one in which she remembers her father, in the ‘muffled atmosphere of the reedbed you mentioned earlier. I wanted to find it again in the colors of the “vision” of the storm, with the full moon and the pouring rain. Then there is the final part of the film-which, as I said, is the first scene we shot-in which Arsa, again inside a dream, but this time no longer disturbing, finally manages to experience a positive contact: she caresses the rediscovered statue. That act is, symbolically, a gesture of conjunction with her father. A gesture that the girl makes in the dream, somehow overcoming the trauma of his death and absence, but perhaps also of his impenetrability when she was alive. In that scene I worked photographically by mixing warm light and cold light, to create a meeting of two worlds: that of memory and that of present emotion. My goal was to return a deep emotional warmth.
We need to talk about the constant presence of the sea. There are many underwater images, beautiful…
I am as much a lover of the sea as I am of the mountains, and Stromboli is the synthesis of these two worlds : a deep, blue sea overlooked by the imposing volcano. With Riccardo Cingillo, the dive operator, we tackled complex shots. During the filming of Arsa, I was able to use my underwater experiences to carefully organize and plan the shoot, which also required the use, in some scenes, of stand-ins for our actors. You should know that the Stromboli sea, in addition to immediately becoming very deep, is often infested with jellyfish. This resulted, among other things, in our actress diving into the sea under difficult conditions…. A large jellyfish also appears in the film!
In addition to underwater shots, there are drone shots, to see from above the sea, the volcano ridge, the reeds Would you like to say something about this variety of images, even from a technical point of view?
The camera is often on the move: handheld, with steadicam and drone, which helped us tell the story of the vastness of the reedbed. I tried to make a film as “green” as possible, also out of necessity: in the location where we shot 80 percent of the scenes, there was no electricity. So I worked mainly with LED lights, including “Melpomene,” De Sisti’s LED triangle light, a high-power, low-power projector. I used the Light Bridge system, which allows reflected sunlight to be shaped by various types of mirror panels, making the most of natural lighting. Everything was powered through battery-powered power stations, autonomous power systems that made a more environmentally sustainable set possible. So I tried to work with natural light, using it in a simple way: direct sunlight, with large reflective panels and black panels (so-called “negatives”) to shape the lighting by eliminating or concentrating it where necessary. This was made possible by careful planning, calculating the right shooting times based on the orientation of the locations, coordinating with the assistant directors and with constant support from the production. We shot the film in wide format using two ARRI ALEXA Mini LF, compact and agile cameras with a sensor with a large shutter latitude. Leitz large format lenses and two Angenieux EZ series zooms .In general, the film was shot with two cameras, operated by Lele Cerri and Giuseppe Vaiuso. In some moments we also worked with three cameras at the same time, and Iacopo Bedogni (who usually takes care of the duo’s shooting) shot some scenes independently to optimize production time or the availability of the actors. In short, a powerful and continuous teamwork, as cinema should always be, helped us to realize a complex and very impressive project.
There is one last thing I wanted to ask you. The opening image ̶ that beautiful emergence of the island from the sea mist ̶ was it shot live or obtained in post-production? It is a stunningly beautiful shot and immediately immerses us in a symbolic context.
It is shot from life, one morning when the fog was thick. We jumped at the chance. As I said before, from this point of view, the film has a lot to do with the documentary spirit: catching the unexpected, being surprised by reality and being able to capture it when it presents itself in all its evocative power. That scene is a perfect example of that. It was a moment when we were confronted with something that we had not planned for, but very evocative. We literally ran to pick it up. The result is a dazzling beginning: it is true that that image immediately introduces us to an inner dimension, made of mystery and also of a deep search. A quest that, precisely because it is never fully defined, manages to engage the viewer from the very first moment.
Thank you Gherardo.
Camera operators: Lele Cerri (also Steadycam) and Giuseppe Vaiuso
Underwater operator Riccardo Cingillo
Assistant operators: Mauro Gianesini and Valter Magri
Assistant operator: Livia Romano
D.I.T. ACES on set: Manuel Mastrostefano
Data manager: Valeria Ferrari
Vidéo Assist: Bernardo Giannone
Drone: Marvin Drone Pa
Machinists: Tango. Marco Alzetta, Massimo Barbona, Alessio Cianciuolo, Marco Gabotti
Electricians: Massimo Amaro, Manolo Catini, Valerio Palmieri
Color-correction: Big Apple
Colorist: Angelo Francavilla
