Released in theaters January 18, 2024
Kripton investigates the suspended lives of six boys, between twenty and thirty years old, voluntarily hospitalized in two psychiatric communities on the outskirts of Rome, who struggle with personality disorders and states of alteration. Through the story of the daily lives of our protagonists, of the relationships they have with each other and with the “adult” world made up of psychiatrists, professionals and families themselves, the film leads us to explore human subjectivity in depth. The extreme condition of mental disorder becomes the key to approaching the mysterious abyss of our mind and, at the same time, a possible metaphor for our time.
director’s notes
Krypton, which in Greek means hidden, is the name of a chemical element considered historically impregnable and which escaped any attempt at identification until the early 1900s.
But Krypton (or rather Krypton) is also an imaginary planet, the place of origin of Clark Kent alias Superman.
For us Krypton is above all the birthplace of Mark Antony, one of the protagonists of our film, at least that’s what he tells us, specifying that the planet did not explode as everyone says, but is still there and “is not very remote” even if in effects “is quite remote”.
My film was born from progressive approaches, within two psychiatric facilities on the outskirts of Rome, to girls and boys suffering from mental illnesses. It is a film of research and sharing, made with patients who have chosen to tell their story. Together with them, doctors and family members participated, whose contribution was fundamental to the completeness of the story.
When I started shooting, there was no writing about the project, only the desire to move forward. I didn’t know a priori the shape to give to the film, nor its pace. It was not possible to hypothesize a before and after, a preparation and a writing, the material was too elusive to be ordered with the working methods of cinema. We had to start shooting, find the main characters, the structure of the story, its language along the way.
In fact, the backbone of the film is made up of simple stylistic elements of observation, conversations in the form of interviews, footage of meetings between doctor and patient, between patients themselves and their families, sudden confessions. However, it was not easy to achieve the naturalness necessary to really be with them and make the camera “disappear”.
This way of filming, the only right one, the only possible one, indirectly suggested to us the form of the film, which imposed only natural lighting on the very small crew, the impossibility of using a tripod and almost any technical device that could hinder or pollute the relationship with the protagonists.
Among all, my main desire was to find the voice, the language, to represent, through cinema, extreme ways of being in the world. Experiences, which certainly and especially belong to the sick, but with which the so-called normal world shares, often without admitting it, themes, fears and questions that have now become inappropriate, shameful or forbidden.
Our present, obsessively stimulated by a performative euphoria that often runs in vain, attempts to exclude from communication and often also from “thinkability” the fundamental questions, the universal ones of the human being. It seems paradoxical but these are precisely the questions that a large part of patients ask themselves, yet, unlike most, they remain dramatically stranded, because they are too fragile to support the weight.
It often seems that when faced with their questions they find themselves facing the mirror reflection of our indecipherable present.
Madness seems to me to be the most effective and most contemporary of the possible metaphors that illuminate our time, given the sense of “unreality” that sometimes seems to have engulfed everyone.
Obviously it’s not just a subjective perception, the data speaks clearly. Psychotropic drugs represent one of the main components of public pharmaceutical spending, forms of psychological distress emerge that were not as relevant in the psychopathology of the twentieth century: panic disorders, borderline disorders, anorexia, phenomena of social withdrawal affecting increasingly younger children.
We leave the answers to the reasons for this trend and the possible treatments to doctors, specialists and experts.
Yet the acceptance, integration, normalization of the mental problem should be a task of the entire community. On the other hand, it is one of the protagonists of the film, Benedetta, who gives us a glimpse of a possible solution, simple but very powerful: the importance of closeness, the need for sharing, the fight against isolation.