(Italy, 2017, 92’)
With: Valerio Mastandrea, Clémence Poésy, Luca Esposito (II), Chiara Stella Riccio, Miguel Herrera.
Lunar comedy that makes an effort analysing the end of life, solitude and death, Little Tito and the aliens is about the process of grieving. And is telling this without denying itself joy and without vilifying the pain’s fatigue. In Nevada’s desert, abandoned by men and aliens, director Paola Randi places a mute and nameless professor, faithful to a love that he is demanding to the stars. The answer is always the same and is about the impossibility of forgetting who is no longer with us.
Grieving takes time and Valerio Mastandrea’s scientist decides to take all the time he needs, perpetuating the pain until the shutdown of any vital feelings.
Stationary on the loss, devastated by the absence and eager for ways to feed his pain, the professor is a survivor seeing in the world only a pretext to a new variation on his unique and unquenchable pain. But then something happens, someone arrives ‘to open up the picture’ and to interrupt the eternal solitude of a man buried in a nothingness that he calls home.
For narration and life to go on, a new character, actually two, are necessary. The restart occurs with Anita and Tito’s moon landing, orphans keeping the mystery of the world, a life that coincides with the future. Distilling the pain of absence into the film genre (sci-fi), Paola Randi inflates a bubble in the desert and starts an initiation binding an uncle and his grandchildren until he adopts them and adopts their surprise.
Paola Randi graduated in Law alongside studying desing, painting, engraving techniques. She worked as Project Manager for 12 years for no profit organizations supporting women in economy. In 1996 she founded TTR, quarterly paper on theatre and visual arts that originated International Festival of Research Theatre in Milan. Since November 2003 she has exclusively worked in cinema. Selected to Talent Campus of Berlinale 2004 (some of the professors were Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears, Anthony Minghella, Walter Murch, Alan Parker), she followed Werner Herzog’s seminary at Torino’s Holden School. Into Paradiso (2010) is her first feature film, followed by Tito e gli alieni (2017).
