Our Life

Director's Statement

How was “La Nostra Vita” born? I’d like to say: Whilst I was writing or filming, but that wouldn’t be true. This film almost certainly came about whilst I was making a documentary, for my own enjoyment, on how council accommodation was allocated to people in Ostia, people who had regular wages coming in, but which were too low to pay for normal housing. They weren’t poor, but they belonged to that population of Italians who only have one wage coming in which, at one time, would have been enough to live on correctly, but is owadays insufficient. They have limited access to information – the television obviously being an exception to the rule – and they have no interest in culture. These families could well have been called “families in difficulty”. And yet, looking at them fairly, without bigotry, they have the same fears and doubts as anyone else. They talked about themselves and their lives with surprising irony and clarity, very rarely claiming they were victims. They might have been disillusioned but they were bursting with life. Another inspiration: Israel, two years ago. I noticed lots of young families going for a walk, late in the evening. Couples who hadn’t yet reached their thirties but they already had two or three children. It is a beautiful utopia, unthinkable in our country. And that is how I decided to tell the story of a young family with three children, set in such a social class, which used to be called the working-class but no longer has a specific word to describe it today. I felt that we hadn’t had a story about the life of such people told with honesty and objectivity for a long time. They had been present in our cinema for a long time, but nowadays we only see them sporadically. As we wrote this story, Rulli, Petraglia and myself wanted to avoid giving a political message through our characters. We wanted to talk about them but we didn’t want to expound a social argument. Of course, a political interpretation, in the noble sense of the word, can be read into the film, but it is not the main motive. We have been extremely careful not to make our characters seem ridiculous, as has often been the case in Italian comedies. We therefore decided to tell the saga of the De Rosa family, looking them straight in the eyes, as if we ourselves were part of their story. We gave them emotional processes that are usually only found in bourgeois family settings: grief, ambition, burning desire for revenge and denial of pain. We tried to get as close as possible to the truth and humanity of Claudio and his family. That is how we came to write, showing respect and affection, trying to avoid commiseration and indifference towards them, allowing the characters to make mistakes, letting them feel things sincerely without making them do things just to please us but simply letting them do what they were actually capable of doing, with their own strengths and weaknesses. That is how we made this film. During filming, the only motto was: breathe and live your characters freely. It is an organic story, a film that resembles a living organism. I pretended to be the sole spectator of an event that was really happening, believing in the characters, listening to their reasoning, as if I hadn’t had a part in inventing them, choosing or directing them. It’s a film that doesn’t want to prove or explain anything, but it makes connections that I judge as fair. Using the camera as a thermometer, it might even gauge the country’s fever.