Film screening - "Lessons of Love" by Chiara Campara

A Biennale College production, Lessons of Love will be screened on Monday the 19th of September 2022 at 6 pm at the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm. The film is set in Northern Italy where a farmer in his thirties is looking for his own path in life away from the family farm.

Lessons of Love is set in a marginal, depopulated mountain world on the outskirts of a big industrial city, a rural milieu bordering on an expanding urban sprawl in which country wisdom and stories about animals exist alongside sports cars and shopping centres. This belated coming of age which unfolds against a backdrop of humdrum beauty and violent contrasts ultimately comes to no definitive conclusion and only poses new questions.

Synopsis

Yuri is 30 years old and has never had a girlfriend. He works with his father on a small farm in a depopulated mountain village he knows all too well, a world he is never really chosen. At a nightclub, he is being going to since he was a boy he meets Agata, a stripper, and finally sees the chance for a relationship with her.

In an attempt to save himself from a life of solitude, Yuri makes the first decision for his own wellbeing in his life: he leaves his father and family and moves to the suburbs of a city nearby. His uncle offers him a job and the chance to imagine another form of existence.

Yuri works with animals every day on the family livestock farm, feeding the animals, taking care of them, seeing to every birth and death among them. Something makes him feel alien to the life he feels flowing through his hands. He is alone and cannot resign himself to the future of solitude that looms large before him. A chance for love with Agata, a girl he met at a nightclub, awakes Yuri to the impending need to make some choices. No one will come looking for him or save him from his frustration and solitude. He must act on behalf of himself and his desires alone. Caught between doubt and awareness of the need to decide, to travel physically and emotionally, Yuri’s true initiation begins as he sets about addressing the deep tension underlying the need to be accepted and loved, the need to meaningfully face up to the force of our desires in order to understand who we really are.

Director's Biography

Chiara Campara studied Philosophy and Documentary Cinema in Milan. She has worked as assistant director and producer for independent cinema projects, and written and directed short and full-length documentaries, such as Sotterranea (2015) and Tempting promises (2017).