In a real Naples Lina Sastri talks about her mother in La casa di Ninetta, her debut behind the camera in which a sunny, light and strong female character emerges. We interviewed the director at Bif&st 2024.
There are stories that almost seem to write themselves, suddenly and quickly, perhaps over the course of a couple of days or even a night. This was the case with the autobiographical book by Lina Sastri “Ninetta’s house“, in which the actress talks about her mother both when she was a middle-aged woman and during her old age, when she was tormented by a humiliating and ferocious disease like Alzheimer’s. And since Alzheimer’s is the erasure of memory, the Sastri instead he chose to set in the eternal present of a book and a film the story of a light and strong woman, courageous and luminous, generous and rebellious, proud of her fur and with a song like a nightingale.
Lina Sastri he brought Ninetta’s house at the Bari International Film Festival 2024, a cultural event that he loves and to which he has given his beautiful voice, for example by staging a show entitled Suddenly thoughts. And it is precisely in the foyer of the Petruzzelli that we meet the new director, beautiful and authentic in the few wrinkles that furrow her face and with that always lively and attentive look that we have admired so many times. First we tell you that Ninetta’s house it doesn’t seem like a first work, but the film of an expert director who knows where to go and what to do: “I honestly don’t know what it would be like if I were to ever direct a film about a story that I don’t know or that doesn’t belong to me” – she replies. ” I only know that in this case, since it was a story that I certainly knew about, given that I had written a booklet and then a screenplay on the subject, paradoxically the thing I was most afraid of, namely directing, instead turned out to be the easier, in the sense that I knew exactly what I wanted to show. Consequently I never asked myself: ‘But with what lens do I shoot this scene? And for the other one I make a total but then maybe I focus on a detail?’. Very simply, if I wanted something to be seen, I made sure to film it. If there were two things or people, I was careful to frame them both.
Alongside Ninetta and her daughter, and Ninetta’s carers and husband, there is another very important character in the film, which almost steals the show from the others: Ninetta’s house. How did you choose it?
The house has great importance in the film. It’s not about the house in the Spanish Quarter that I got for mom when she got sick because we no longer had a home. She had moved to Agropoli, by the sea, and we had no other properties. The house in which I shot is not the house of origin, but in the film it becomes the house of origin, while the exteriors belong to the neighborhood where I was born, in Via degli Zingari. Our house no longer existed but the neighborhood remained. We all wanted to carefully avoid the Spanish neighborhoods for outdoor scenes because they are now used a lot in the cinema made in Naples. We chose the San Lorenzo neighborhood, which is not very well known and is therefore an area where the “Neapolitan” rhetoric that is currently present in Naples, which is experiencing a period of tourist brilliance, has not yet arrived. San Lorenzo, on the other hand, is a Naples almost as it was, where you hear a language spoken that you understand.”
And in fact, even if there are no subtitles, the Neapolitan language of La casa di Ninetta is perfectly understandable…
The Neapolitan language is understandable. The Neapolitan language is: “How are you?”, not “how are you?”. It is not cut with the ax only on the consonants without the endings. The Neapolitan language is relaxed, it has a movement, a melody, a softness just like the sea and it is a beautiful language. The Neapolitan of the new generations, however, is not, and perhaps it is normal for this to happen, also due to the desire to be faster, more synthetic. Neapolitan is written in one way and read in another, but now they write it the same way they read it and it has become an almost incomprehensible language, which for example is that of Neapolitan rappers: very multifaceted and very hard. Neither Ninetta’s house instead we speak a sweet, soft, light and plain language.
A bit like that of Eduardo De Filippo…
Exactly. And in fact I was born with the school of Eduardo.
In the film Lucia says that Ninetta fell ill with Alzheimer’s because she couldn’t bear the loneliness. Did she feel that alone?
In the end, as often happens to many elderly people, when the children grow up, Ninetta she was left alone. My brother and I were now adults and had our own lives. Now he’s no longer there, he left during the course of this film, during which many things happened. My father was in Brazil, he wasn’t there, he never came back, and so she was alone. Once upon a time we all lived together in a large house, when that prehistoric thing called a family existed, old people grew old in company: there were children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Now this custom no longer exists and old age has become an island of loneliness, and it is terrible. Ninetta she had me, who went to her as soon as possible, and also my brother who, like all males, was more distracted, but I passed away just when she left.
In the film you confess that you feel guilty about this. It is still so? Do you feel like you still have something to atone for?
I expressed everything when I wrote the booklet many years ago. It was truly a need, the best expression there could be. I certainly didn’t think I would write a book, but instead I sat there and wrote, then continued the next day and finished. I’m not one to sit down and write, so it really was a necessity. As for the film, the wonderful thing was recreating that life.
How did you choose Maria Pia Calzone as a young Ninetta and Angela Pagano as an older Ninetta?
I was very careful about choosing the actors, it took me months to find one Ninetta soft and Mediterranean. For the Ninetta old immediately came to mind Angela Pagano. I debuted with Angela: I was 17 and the show was Masaniello. She is a great Neapolitan actress and she was the right age to be an old woman Ninetta, which he rendered with great skill. As for the Ninetta young, the task was more difficult because she was a 40, 50 year old woman who shouldn’t have dark colors like mine. She had to be like my mother was: light and with her light, and that’s why I chose Maria Pia Calzonewhich perfectly embodies its softness, strength and modernity.
And with the casting of Massimo De Matteo for the role of Alfonso?
I had to find a Alfonso that it was negative in some ways but also seductive and in love with Ninettabecause he was in love with Ninetta. He was a handsome, charming man, someone who made himself from nothing, he was in second grade and one day he left to seek his fortune.
Who is he more like, his father or his mother?
I have always been more like my father, who was Sicilian and therefore more closed, strong, truthful and rigorous, while my brother was closer to my mother. As I grow up, or rather as I get older, I resemble her more and more, and this is because lightness and laughter have somehow entered into me, so what I say, for example that money comes and goes and is not important, is came from my mother. She had no rules, even though she lived her life with true ethics, and, as I said, she had a lightness that I will never conquer, not to mention her splendid voice.
Looking at Ninetta’s three carers, one thinks of Pedro Almodovar’s films with many female characters. Were the women who took care of her mother really like in the film?
They were like that and they were called like that. One is dead, Carmela, the one who kept the house and cooked. She passed away a year after we shot, she was a Filumena Marturano of the Spanish neighborhoods. Marinellaon the other hand, was a former nurse who wanted to be beautiful and who enjoyed reading cards. Jasminefinally, he was a kind of mouse, who got annoyed very easily. I chose the three actresses who interpret them with accuracy, because then, as it teaches Eduardoif you choose a comedian also for his body, 50% of the work is done.