The writer reveals herself, her passions and her challenges in the film directed by Katia Bernardi which will be presented on October 19 at the Rome Film Fest
I am a completely free person and at my age I can say with some happiness that I have been free all my life. What Susanna Tamaro talks about is inner freedom – the one that really frightens, because it lays bare the human. Then there is the outside, the mask, the one that the writer has worn for years, since she was a child, and which she has now decided to leave. He started a few years ago, with a book – Your gaze lights up the world (Solferino, 2018) in which he revealed that he had Asperger’s syndrome. Today he does it, in all respects, with a film. Is called Unpublished, like Susanna who tells – her passions, memories, difficulties, challenges – and was directed by Katia Bernardi: it will be presented in Rome, at the Rome Film Fest, on 19 October. Inside there is everything, from martial arts to bees, from difficult beginnings to the overwhelming success that brought Tamaro to the top of the publishing world, up to the ferocity of his detractors. There is everything because Susanna Tamaro was and many things and now, after thirty years of life (despite herself) she publishes and thirty books under her belt, she has decided to remove a veil made of misunderstandings and fictions due to Asperger’s syndrome, which it makes sociality difficult for her, but also and not a little because of its being difficult to label, free of a freedom that scares many: I have always been mentally different from other people, and you pay for that.
A very high cost, which the writer is no longer willing to bear: I want to show the person I am and have always been – she says in the film – without masks. For thirty years I have had an enormous effort to play the part of Susanna Tamaro, I have decided to stop. There you, in the film. Voice not alone: his brother, Lorenzo Tamaro, Roberta Mazzoni, a friend with whom he has shared his life for thirty years, the literary agent Vicki Satlow, Marco Sosic, a companion in literary discussions and eating, speak. Each tells a piece of the writer, as elusive as an unaware elf, but most of all Susanna to tell. We proceed by places, starting from the white expanse of Trentino, where Tamaro retires to write every year (director Katia Bernardi tells of having met her there, on the slopes, during a walk of more than two hours: I trudged and she walked like if nothing had happened, we revealed ourselves). A silence where the author hopes to spend more and more time: My soul needs this white, perhaps to write a few more books, she says, opening a crack after the announcements of withdrawal from writing. After the mountain, the green of Porano, in Umbria, where Tamaro lives. Here there is, above all, the great passion for nature, observation: I feel a naturalist, not a writer, if I could have studied I would have been an entomologist. Yet, she says, writing saved her: Not understanding anything about the world, I had to cling to words to understand the deepest thread of things. The thirty books, he says, he wrote them to try to understand the world. In the quiet of her campaign, Tamaro overcomes the gap that makes her public life almost painful (photos, TV, social occasions terrify me) and reveals her weaknesses and the syndrome that since she was a year old has made her struggle with a monster, unknown first then diagnosed after she had recognized herself by reading about it in a magazine.
Then there is Trieste (occult protagonist of all my books), difficult childhood, distant parents. The first literary proofs and the refusals of publishing houses. Rome, reached at 18 to study at the Experimental Center of Cinematography. The world of work that does not welcome her: she is precarious in Rai, she participates in a competition as a gardener of the Municipality. At the age of 22, the shock of writing, on Ponte Sisto: but a way to communicate with the world, she does not think about a real future as a novelist. It will be a competition organized by Marsilio to make reality Go where your heart takes you: 18 million copies sold in 45 countries since then. In the film, the archive clips show a disoriented Susanna in the living room of Door to door. A success that overwhelms her. And he gives her enemies: in ’97 later Anima Mundi they told me everything: fascist, reactionary, sentimental. Since then, a continuous work to defend itself. And just be Susanna Tamaro. Famous, and unknown.
The screenings in the hall and on TV
Unpublished, dedicated to the writer Susanna Tamaro, written and directed by Katia Bernardi and produced and distributed by Gaia Avvantaggiato – GA&A Productions; producer Laura Romano. The film made in collaboration with Rai Cultura and Trentino Film Commission with the support of the Luca and Katia Tomassini and Montura Foundation. Ineditaverr officially presented at the Rome Film Fest (Riflessi section) on Tuesday 19 October at 9.30 pm at the Maxxi – National Museum of XXI Century Arts. Afterwards, the screenings will take place, again in Rome, on Wednesday 20 October at 11 and Saturday 23 at 17 in the Scena – former FilmStudio space and on Sunday 24 October at 14.30 at Cinema Savoy 2. On Monday 27 December at 21.30 the film will be broadcast on television on Rai 5.
October 14, 2021 (change October 14, 2021 | 08:33)
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