Rita

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Rita is ten years old and blind since birth, lives in a seaside neighbourhood of Palermo. She is stubborn, curious and feels thwarted by an overprotective dictatorial mother. The claustrophobic world of her home is suddenly breached by a mysterious presence. It's a boy on the run, wounded, terrified. The meeting between the two of them is highly enigmatic. Thanks to her mysterious new friend, or perhaps only thanks to her imagination and courage, Rita escapes from home and goes to the beach. She learns to swim and experiences a brief moment of freedom which ends when the miraculous encounter vanishes and she finds herself alone in the sea.

Filmmaker Notes

How to stage the point of view of a blind girl? How to induce in the spectator a minor experience of blindness and what it might be like to overcome it?
During this short film the camera is focused on Rita, without reverse angle shots. Rita is under everyone’s gaze, the gaze of others which acts also as a controlling element, a form of surveillance. We can’t see what Rita has before her because she can’t either. For example, we see her mother’s hands flit in and out of the frame, when her mother is fussing around her, but we never see her mother. We feel the desire to see what stands before her but, for the most part of the short film, we are not granted any gratification of this desire. For Rita hearing is fundamental, and that is why the story, from her “point of view” is told through the sounds, the noises. The sounds represent what we can’t see, they evoke it, and to some extent create it. Only through an unexpected and enigmatic encounter does the staging change, because this meeting suddenly enables her to "see" and we, for the first time, are gifted with her perspective and share her vision. The film explores this brief moment of grace. Then everything goes back to normal for Rita and for us.