Italian filmmaker Fabrizio Cattani brought “Forever With You,” his exploration of childhood, grief and the loss of a parent, to the Middle East for the first time this week, with the film receiving a Green Carpet premiere at the 13th Sharjah Intl. Film Festival for Children and Youth in the UAE.
With Italy celebrated as this year’s Country of Honor, the festival has put a spotlight on the country’s cinema. For Cattani, “Forever With You” also marks a turn toward younger audiences after previous films centered on more difficult adult subjects.
Adapted from an Italian novel of the same name, “Forever With You” follows Filo, a young boy struggling to understand the death of his mother. Set in 1998 and told through flashbacks, the film turns his journey through grief into an adventure in which the people around him represent different parts of his inner world.
“Filo, the protagonist, represents our rational part. Rullo, his friend, is the emotional part. The father is the mature part, Amelie is the childish part and Guelpho is the scary part,” Cattani tells Variety. “All these parts are inside of us. I liked using these symbols to deal with such a delicate subject as mourning.”
For Cattani, childhood offered a way into that subject precisely because of the innocence with which Filo encounters the world.
“He observes the world through the eyes of innocence, which we unfortunately lose when we grow up,” the director explains. “It allows him to have the strength to explore and understand the importance of small things, the things that have value.”
“Childhood is very powerful because that’s where the person starts,” he adds. “Everything develops from what people experience in their childhood, what they receive in their education and what they see. We are sponges as children. What we absorb, we transmit in the later stages of our lives.”
That perspective also places “Forever With You” within a longstanding Italian cinematic tradition of using children to explore larger social and emotional realities. Cattani points to Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves” as an “absolute masterpiece,” while describing his own film as distinctly Italian in its setting, dialects and other locally rooted elements.
Shot in the autumn in Calabria, the “toe” at the end of the Italian peninsula’s boot, the film makes the region’s forests a character in their own right. Yet Cattani believes the story can travel because its central experience transcends its Italian setting. “It can open up internationally because the loss of a mother is a theme that unites the whole world,” he says.
Cattani had already presented the film at the Locarno Film Festival, but was curious about how young audiences in the Middle East would respond to it.
“I don’t know this culture so deeply, so I wanted to understand the reaction of the audience,” he notes. “What impressed me was seeing the kids after the screening come to thank me, congratulate me and tell me how excited they were by the film.”
For Cattani, their reaction reinforced an idea that runs throughout his work. “The emotions connected to people very close to us, like a parent, and connected to love, unite the whole world,” he says. “For me, cinema must be emotionally rooted. A story must be emotional. Otherwise, I’m not interested.”
Cattani also sees festivals such as SIFF as potential bridges between the Italian and Arab film industries at a moment when he says independent filmmaking in Italy faces increasing financial pressure. Beyond cultural exchange, he hopes stronger ties could eventually extend to production and financing.
His next film, however, takes him back toward an adult protagonist. Set around the marble quarries of Carrara in Tuscany, where Cattani grew up, the project centers on the “medico condotto,” the village doctors who once served small Italian communities and whose role disappeared following changes to the country’s health system.
But Cattani is already developing another project that would bring him back to young protagonists. “Young Rebels” is based on the true story of a group of young scouts who defied a fascist ban on Catholic associations and continued their activities in secret, helping thousands of people targeted by the regime escape across the mountains into Switzerland.
“It is a film that talks about freedom,” Cattani says. “They rebelled against this imposition and decided to embrace freedom and help people who were being persecuted.”
After “Forever With You,” Cattani plans to continue exploring stories centered on childhood.
“I think children have a lot to say and a lot to give to adults,” he argues. “Today’s young people have an incredible maturity.”
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