HAPPY AS LAZZARO

Director's Statement

When travelling through my country I have often met people like Lazzaro. People I would call good people, but who most of the time do not dedicate themselves to doing good, because they do not know what it is to do good. They simply are, and that which they are means they forever remain in the shadows, because, whenever possible, they relinquish their own selves in order to leave space for others. They are not able to emerge from these shadows. They don’t even know that it is possible to “emerge”.
After reflecting at length on the origins of stories, which are often about people who, unlike these Lazzaros, impose their own destiny, I felt a strong desire to recount the journey of someone whose actions are overwhelmed by events: actions that are perhaps mistaken, but which nonetheless arise from a sort of unconscious and limitless goodness.
Lazzaro cannot change the world: his saintliness is not recognised. The saints, as we imagine them, must have strength and charisma, and be able to impose themselves. However, I don’t think saintliness is linked to charisma. Instead, I believe that if a saint, with their unlikely martyrdom, were to appear in our modern lives, we may not even recognise them as such. They are someone who is empty, who does not know what it means to triumph as an individual. Someone who is surprised but keeps going when the road ends, if they are told that the road doesn’t end. Someone who believes fully in those around them.
This is how the character of Lazzaro was created. From the desire to recount to the world in the lightest way possible, with love and with humour, the tragedy that has devastated my country: the abandonment of the countryside, the migration of thousands of people who knew nothing of modernity to the fringes of cities, and of how they renounced what little they had to have even less. A tragedy that today is being repeated, in the same way, elsewhere.