Weightless  

Sulla terra leggeri / Weightless  

Sara Fgaier, Italy, 2024, 94′

Meandering through time and space, this tender tale seeks to answer what happens when we forget the love of our life.

Gian, an ethnomusicology professor in his sixties, is struggling in the darkness caused by the sudden onset of amnesia. This painful condition forces him to hole up in his study, uncaring of the world outside, even his daughter Miriam who he doesn’t seem to recognise. Moving into his apartment with her son, Elyas, she hands Gian a diary written by his twenty-year old self, filled with stories, descriptions, thoughts and dreams that all revolve around Leila, the French-Tunisian girl with whom he discovers love in the course of a night.

“Weightless is a film about loss and the sometimes desperate attempt to reclaim what has been lost: a memory, a love, even a moment in history (depicted in archive footage with the real, silent characters who themselves loved, lost, cried, laughed and lived before Gian) and an ancient horizon, evoked by ancient rituals that create an intimate dialogue between the living and the dead, giving a collective, cosmic sense to individual destinies, removing them, in part, from solipsism and isolation, and finding the lightness cited by Italo Calvino: ‘a gliding over things from above, without letting things weigh on your heart’.”

Sara Fgaier is an Italian-Tunisian director, editor and producer. Her short film The Years (2018) won the EFA award for Best European Short Film. Weightless (2024) is her first feature film, which premiered in International Competition at the Locarno Film Festival. As editor and producer, she made several films, including The Mouth of the Wolf (2009) and Lost and Beautiful (2015) by Pietro Marcello.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with Sara Fgaier.

With the support of Italian Cultural Institute.