Italian director presents story on contemporary youth weakness

"Our Italian youth now are more connected with the outside world but they are lonelier, with a weaker outlook of life and vision of the reality," said Italian film director Giuseppe Piccioni at the 73rd Venice Film Festival.

"On the other side, I feel they are more adult, engaged and mature especially from a professional point of view then the ones of my generation," Piccioni told Xinhua here on his film Questi Giorni in competition at the film festival.

The movie is centered on four normal Italian girls trying to find new stimulus in life through an "initiation journey" in Belgrade where one of the protagonist is going to work.

The Italian director said the idea originated from a story written by a girl who attended his script course. At the end of the course the girl told Piccioni that she understood she didn't like to write scripts but something else.

"I suggested she write a story about four girls then she wrote a novel that became my starting point," Piccioni said.

Piccioni explained that the choice of Belgrade reflected his own personality -- like his female protagonist, he didn't make "mainstream" choices.

He said he found Belgrade to be a "beautiful city with nice old palaces and an atmosphere mixing the socialist heritage and the imperial central European tradition."

Talking about his views on contemporary cinema, the director said the movie should be different from what people see from the socio-political point of view in the daily news.

"Because films have a full personal vision of the world, which is detached from the current reality. Cinema has the power, through an artificial process, to reinterpret facts ending up closer to your intimate soul more than a faithful representation of the reality," he said.

"I wanted to do a movie based on the truth but manipulating reality without trying to imitate an attitude or a way of speaking that is not part of ourselves," Piccioni said. Endit