Simone Bozzelli on Cinema, Desire, and the Sacred Body

Simone Bozzelli, born in 1994, graduated in Media, Design and Multimedia Arts at NABA in 2017 and in Film Direction at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome in 2020. His early short films "Mio Fratello" and "Loris sta bene" screened at international festivals. "Amateur" competed at the 34th Venice International Critics' Week, and "J'adore" won first prize at the 35th edition. In 2021 he directed the video for Måneskin's "I Wanna Be Your Slave," which won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Alternative Video in 2022. His fifth short "Giochi" premiered at the 74th Locarno Film Festival. "Patagonia" is his first feature film. In an interview with Ludovico Pratesi for Artribune, Bozzelli discusses his inspirations, including R.W. Fassbinder and Marco Ferreri, whose works he describes as disorienting rather than persuasive. He considers "Patagonia" his most representative project, born from a collaboration with screenwriter Tommaso Favagrossa, exploring an unequal relationship, emotional abuse, and the mysterious pleasure in suffering. For Bozzelli, places carry symbolic weight, citing Bruno Dumont's "Twentynine Palms" as an example. He advises young filmmakers to remain amateurs, taking risks and following instinct. On the sacred, he states: "My faith and my unknown are bodies." He references Giorgio Agamben's concept of the contemporary as untimeliness, advocating for neutralizing the lights of one's era to discover its darkness.