“I tried to make the viewer a witness of this process of deterioration”: Sara Fgaier on her amnesia drama Weightless
An amnesiac pieces together fragments of his life and lost love in Weightless. Italian director Sara Fgaier tells us about her ambitious use of archive footage to evoke a passing era.
Gian, the protagonist of Sara Fgaier’s debut feature Weightless, is a music professor who is diagnosed with temporary amnesia. His condition, it seems, was triggered by the death of his wife Leila, and he’s unable to remember his marriage or recognise the people around him. To help him remember his old love, Gian’s daughter Miriam hands him an old diary that he’d written years ago, which prompts fragmented recollections of his long-forgotten younger self.
Shot on 16mm film stock and edited with a variety of archive footage, Fgaier’s film delves into the theme of memory and its loss with a balance that’s both dreamy and pulsating. The Italian director spent three years writing, researching and preparing for the shoot in Italy and Tunisia, and cast three different actors to play Gian at different stages of his life. She joined us to discuss this moving poem about gratitude, ageing and bereavement, which screens in the Love strand of the BFI London Film Festival.
What inspired you to make a film about amnesia?
I really liked the idea of the protagonist discovering his past through an old diary from his youth. On one hand, for aesthetic reasons, I wanted literary prose in the film, something that would emerge from the page and not from dialogue. On the other hand, through amnesia, I was able to better investigate the connection between memory and identity.
The protagonist, Gian, is racking his brain in a desperate attempt to remember the face and then the story of Leila, and he discovers his deeply hidden desires and emotions. But most of all I realised how the concept of amnesia related to loss was crucial for me; by forgetting his lost love, the protagonist reiterates the loss, he makes it final. Paradoxically, by recomposing his memory and finding out about her death, he brings her back to life. Amnesia turns into a powerful tool for Gian to look where he never had the courage to see. It is Orpheus leaning out of the mirror in a time out of time.
Did you intend to use archive footage from the very beginning?
From the start, I visualised this film as a lyrical collage, bringing together material of different origins such as live action, archive material, documentary footage and so on. Then, while writing, I wanted to allow the freedom to rewrite in the editing process, to acquire a simplified form of complex content. Until I reached the current synthesis.
Weightless is a film about loss and the coexistence of different times, which is the condition that Gian lives in, and I wanted to translate it through images. The idea of being ‘out of time’ and the simultaneity of different eras is something that cinema, more than any other art, can produce. Archive images, for me, do not necessarily depend on what they carry with them. They can generate a new world, a space that is not past nor present, with silent characters who themselves loved, lost, cried and laughed before Gian. They are an ancient horizon, evoked by ancient rituals that create an intimate dialogue between the living and the dead, giving a cosmic sense to their individual destiny.
How did you orchestrate the structure and use of these images?
It was the most extensive research that I have done in my life, involving some 16 archives in different countries in Europe and America, and of different natures including private collections, found footage and military films. There are moments in the film in which archive images have a specific role in the narrative. For example, when they accompany a page of the diary to become the protagonist’s way of imagining.
The thread that structures the film is not Gian’s story, nor the archive itself. I didn’t want to separate them but to weave these images with his own imagery. The keyword that guided me was fragmentation. The eruption of images and flashes that could represent his confusion. I tried to make the viewer a witness of this process of deterioration. Also, there is something about the feeling of an era that is fading as a way of loving. Because when someone dies, an entire era goes with them. And the archive is ‘the era’. This is why it was so important to connect the story with the texture of the archive.
What references did you look to during the process?
The first inspiration came when I was filming a carnival festival in the heart of Sardinia, a cult of archaic origins dedicated to Dionysus of the East. It is very similar to the dance of the mystic Muslims, still present in Maghreb where I filmed later. These are powerful, timeless rituals where the dimensions of the seen and the unseen seem to communicate. Contrary to the present times, in these rituals everything is collective and shared, a person is never alone in the rite of illness or grief.
Worldliness transforms death to a taboo and diminishes loss, making it a private matter. This does not happen in the Sardinian carnival where it is the very communal nature of the celebration to allow a catharsis. Similarly, the therapeutic function of the journey towards the unseen in Sufi’s possession ritual is a collective experience. Healing is achieved, thanks to the communal dance, in a fusional and empathetic atmosphere.
Then I discovered Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life, which I devoured in one sitting on the train from Paris to London, while travelling to present my short film, The Years (2018), at the ICA. It made me realise that I wanted to examine the theme of memory, something that had been present in all my previous work as a dimension of the unseen. Put together two things that have never been together before, and the world is changed. This is what I have tried to do with my film, intertwining falling in love, pain, the ancient rites of Dionysian origin, dreams and our relationship with death. All experiences which can reconfigure time and space, and make us consider our primal needs: to be more than self and go beyond the boundaries of ego.
What music choices did you make to set the desired mood for your film?
The film has an original soundtrack composed by maestro Carlo Crivelli. Meeting Carlo was a turning point. Not only did he compose some extraordinary music, but he also brought a vision to the film and united the story.
There are also some repertoire pieces, including Handel, which I had already chosen at the writing stage. It is no coincidence that what dissolves the pain and allows the emotion to flow again is a requiem, music especially conceived for loss and death. This music makes the experience of grief and mourning more intense and at the same time it provides relief and consolation by penetrating the heart directly.
Finally, my sound editor, Riccardo Spagnol, created some tracks, in which you never hear a single piece, but a patchwork of musical fragments and effects are stitched together for a kind of kaleidoscopic musical game. Like Gian, Riccardo has worked with music and sounds of the world. We used these sounds as a sort of mnemonic aid to allow our protagonist access to moods, thoughts and worlds that were seemingly lost.
What challenges did you come up against?
It was my first feature film, and I was aware from the start it would not be easy: it is spoken in several languages; the casting took place between Italy, France and Tunisia; the characters are iridescent (there are three actors playing the protagonists at different ages); I filmed in different countries (Italy and Tunisia), in different Italian regions (Lazio, Sardinia, Liguria), in an abandoned quarry only reachable on foot, on top of a cliff, on board a biplane above the Mediterranean Sea, during a real carnival and with an animal that cannot be domesticated.
Sometimes, while writing, I had to think that I would not be the one to make it, so that I could concentrate on the narrative. It was not something I decided to do by default; I could not premeditate it and decide to write something less ambitious or less risky. Perhaps precisely because it is the first time, I think it was impossible to write on command or with a preconceived strategy. It was the exact opposite; I was almost overwhelmed by it, and I was the first to be surprised.