Italy, 2018, 87’
Regia / Direction: Margherita Ferri
Sceneggiatura / Screenplay: Margherita Ferri
Produttore / Producer: Chiara Galloni, Ivan Olgiati
Interpreti / Cast: Eleonora Conti, Susanna Acchiardi, Fabrizia Sacchi, Edoardo Lomazzi, Alexandra Gaspar.
Fotografia / Cinematography: Marco Ferri
Musica / Music: Alicia Galli
Scenografia / Set Designer: n.d.
Montaggio / Editor: Marco Ferri
Produzione / Producer Company: Articolture
Distribuzione / Distributor: Cinecittà Luce
Contatti: sales@cinecittaluce.it
Maia, called ZEN, is a restless and solitary sixteen year old girl who lives in a small town in the Emilia Apennines. She is the only female of the local hockey team and her companions do not lose the opportunity to bully her for her tomboy attitude. When Vanessa - the intriguing and confused girlfriend of a player of the team - runs away from home and hides in the shelter of Maia's mother, between the two a bond is born and Maia manages for the first time to trust someone doubts about her identity. Both driven by the need to get out of the roles that the small community has forced them to interpret, Maia and Vanessa begin a journey in search of their identity and sexuality, liquid and restless as only adolescence can be.
Director's note: Zen on thin ice is a training story, which follows the emotional path of Maia, called Zen: a teenager in conflict with her gender identity, for this misunderstood and bullied by her peers. Even though I've never played hockey, the upsets of Maia and Vanessa are part of my personal story. The restlessness of knowing "different", the magic of being attracted to a person of their kind without knowing what is happening or even giving a name to that feeling, the desire to be seen and accepted for what one is: these emotions are you are the essence of my teenage life and today I am in the film. As a director, I have always been interested in giving life and centrality to people like Maia, who live on the margins of their communities. Zen on thin ice speaks precisely of the fragile boundary between wanting to belong to a group and being oneself without conditioning. The film, in fact, tells the discomfort and the struggles that must face those who do not conform to gender roles and the heteronormativity imposed by our society. I tried to tell the story of Maia juxtaposing her emotions to the landscape of the Emilian Apennines, beautiful and forgotten. I wanted to explore the relationship between the production of the landscape and the identity of those who live those territories, working on the idea of emotional landscape: a tool to stimulate the viewer visually and accompany him in the deepest dimension of the characters. I wanted to make a film rooted in the LGBT + community and in our territories, but with the aim of leading the public in that universal journey that leads to the discovery of themselves, in the troubled years of adolescence.
Margherita Ferri.
Margherita Ferri is an Italian director and screenwriter born in Imola, in 1984. She attended the UCLA School of Cinema and TV, where she wrote and directed two short films and a documentary. She graduated in Communication Sciences at the University of Bologna and began working as a programmer for the Gender Bender Film Festival. He then attended the direction course at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. He also worked as a director for several television programs, as a second production assistant for BiBi Film and completed his first documentary feature film Where’s the Elephant, shot in Kenya. He later directed a documentary on professional poker players Generation of chance. He is currently writing the screenplay for his first feature film, In the Can. With Davide Labanti and Renato Giugliano, he won the competition for web series "Are You Series?" with Status, currently under development.
