Midway through the 81st Venice Film Festival, Italian director Giovanni Tortorici ranks near the front of the pack of the event’s most promising new director discoveries of 2024. The Palermo-born filmmaker, who spent several years as an assistant and apprentice under leading Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino, premiered his first feature Diciannove Friday on the Lido. The film is competing in the festival’s Horizons section, which focuses on promising work by first or second-time filmmakers.

A coming-of-age film that eschews all the familiar tropes of the genre, Diciannove is a brutally honest portrait of what it feels like to be 19 years old, full of disparate desire, intellectually ambitious, and utterly lost. The film tells the story of teenaged Leonardo Gravina (first-time actor Manfredi Marini), a young man who is coming into himself while coming apart at the seams after he makes the sudden decision to abandon business studies in London for a literature degree in Siena, where he becomes increasingly obsessed with obscure 19th-century Italian authors. Wandering through the winding streets and mildewing apartments of the medieval Tuscan city, Leonardo becomes the quintessential teenage romantic, both bursting with youthful promise and corroding from adolescent alienation. 

In an admiring review, The Hollywood Reporter critic Jordan Mintzer wrote, “The film’s complete abandonment of plot will turn away viewers looking for some kind of guiding principle or shape to Leonardo’s life, but that’s also what makes Diciannove feel more real than many movies supposedly about being young today. In some ways, Tortorici is carrying on a tradition of Italian art films, including Fellini’s I Vitelloni and Pasolini’s Accattone, about disaffected youth who are part of a lost generation, although Leonardo seems to belong to no other group but his own.”

THR connected with Tortorici to discuss the making of Diciannove and how it resurrects his own aching passage through young manhood. 

How do you sum up Diciannove‘s premise and your cinematic approach to it? 

It’s about the experience of being 19 years old. But during his trajectory through the film, the protagonist and his personality don’t develop too much. As the film ends, he’s much the same as he was when it began. So, it’s a little different from other coming-of-age stories. The idea came up from my own experience. I was very curious to explore some things that I had lived through, things that were not super impactful. I wanted to try a form of narration that describes little things on a daily basis — things that are a symptom of a way of being. 

This appealed to you because it felt truer to life than the usual tropes of the coming-of-age genre? 

Yes, I just tried to be authentic to what I experienced — to be as close to life as possible. I wasn’t trying to follow any narrative schemes at all.

You shot on film rather than digital, correct? What can you share about your visual intentions? 

Yes, the movie was shot in 35mm. My director of photography, Massimiliano Kuveiller, and I did a lot of rehearsals and tests with lenses and I was very attached to 35mm. The visual language of the film was something that was very important to me. I come from a background in literature. From the age of 17, I began studying literature very intensely. At a certain point, I began to imagine telling stories with cinema, but it was very difficult at the beginning for me to imagine switching from literature to a cinematic language. But at a certain point, there was like a switch. I remember I was watching Susperia by Dario Argento and there is a scene near the beginning when the character is at the airport. There is a closeup of a sliding door — and from that moment, I felt that I suddenly understood a little about cinematic language. It’s something a little simple, but I felt I understood. So in my film, there are two moments with closeups of sliding doors which are a little homage. 

Although he is young and beautiful, the protagonist is very alienated from his body — there are little hints of body horror peppered throughout the film. Is that just part of the nature of adolescence for you? 

Yeah, at that age you can be very alienated from your own body, because of a general neurosis, I think. Because at that age, you have a lot of passions and it’s not easy to understand them, so sometimes what happens is you sublimate things, or you connect your passions to unpredictable things. This is a very repressed character. He’s isolating himself and studying literature quite obsessively, so he’s alienated from his body and his instincts at times. So you can see that his passions need to get out in some way. For example, he’s looking for sexual encounters, and in one scene he uses the excuse of not having money to buy books to explore his sexual desires by posting ads to [prostitute] himself online.

You mentioned how the film is largely autobiographical. I think it’s natural that viewers will wonder to what extent it’s autobiography versus fiction. For example, the pre-modern literature he’s so passionate about — were those your intellectual obsessions and beliefs? 

Oh yes, it’s very much autobiographical. Obviously, it’s impossible to be 100 percent autobiographical, so I mixed in a little fantasy. But in my youth, I loved the literature and the books that he loves. One of the very famous Italian writers I was obsessed with — which is in the film — was Giacomo Leopardi, who says that when you go with autobiography, you stop the use of rhetoric. So yes, I try to be very faithful to what I experienced. I lived in the Siena and the apartment that you see in the movie is the very same apartment that I lived in over nine years ago — we shot in the same room. The costume designer I work with, Maria Antonia Tortorici, she’s my sister. So she knew very well who I was in that period and what kind of things we all wore. Together, we went to our parents’ house in Palermo and found our old clothes and we used a lot of them to dress the characters. Even the first scene of the film, where the mother says to the boy, “Why are you sleeping in your sister’s room?” That scene was shot in my sister’s old room in my parents’ house in Palermo. 

So how do you feel now after having interrogated your past so deeply — having sort of exorcised it, or gotten it all out artistically on screen? 

I feel happy. You know, as time goes by you lose some of your memories. So I think it was good for me to have made this and in a certain way to have stopped time. It’s kind of Proust and Remembrance of Things Past. It makes me very happy to have represented how it was. And not just out of ego. When I was a kid I would have liked so much to have been able to watch a movie or read a book that represented the personal experience of someone at that age with full sincerity. So I was also trying to do that for other young people who are like I was. 

I was, of course, very compelled by that closing dialog with the older, wealthy art collector character, who bluntly asks the protagonist the questions that the audience has probably been asking themselves — essentially, why is this young man like this? 

For the first hour and 30 minutes of the film, you are very close to the character and his neuroses. And at a certain point, I think you need a more mature, psychoanalytical perspective in some way. I don’t know, maybe I was a little bit scared that after being so close to the character, the audience in some way could have believed that the point of view of the film is that he is right in his views and that he is as smart as he thinks he is. Maybe I had that unconscious fear, so I needed a character to come in a do a little demolition of the protagonist’s character — someone more in touch with philosophy, psychoanalysis and life experience. I think that’s why I felt we needed this scene, but I’m not sure. I need to think about it more myself. 

After a film that’s so personal and autobiographical, I can’t help but wonder where you might go next with your work. 

I’ve actually written another script. I was a little bit tempted to go in a more fictional direction, telling a story far from my personal experience. But I think every story you tell becomes personal and ends up reflecting you. I remember the classic quote from Flaubert, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” So I started thinking about when I was 16 and how different I was from when I was 19. The social environment and the way I was living was completely different. But 19, my life was very intellectually driven, but when I was 16 it was like a Larry Clark kind of story — drugs and girls, and wild adolescence — in some ways fun and in some aspects terrible. So I was thinking that I would be sad if I lost these memories, so I wrote a script about it. When I showed this script to some producers and some of my collaborators, they said they were amazed by how different it was from Diciannove even though it’s also based on my experiences. 

So rather than venturing away from your personal experience, you’re going deeper into it. 

(Laughs) Yeah, but in the future I would also like to explore other things. I actually love genre movies, thrillers, even kung fu movies. So we will see.