How do you think it might be going on a bike without a saddle? ‘Painful’, says the producer Alessandro Giuggioli. His little independent film ‘In Bici Senza Sella’ (Riding without saddle), has nothing to do with cycling but it’s about unemployment and job insecurity, which affect young people in Italy. Even better, it’s a movie about being a precario, a person who works with no safeguard or hopes of being in a long-term position.
‘The movie is made of six different episodes’, Alessandro explains. ‘Every episode has a different director and all of them are young directors at their first experience. The characters are all in temporary employment or even jobless, but instead of complaining about their precarious situation, they all try to find a solution, they use their creativity, and I found this being a very Italian peculiarity, the real Italian factor’.
Alessandro himself is the creator of the movie, the producer and not only. ‘I’m the main character in one of the episode, the extra in all the others, the costume-maker, the script-maker, the runner and everything else it was needed on set’.
The majority of the actors are young and not famous yet, but there are some cameos, actors like Edoardo Pesce, Francesco Montanari, Riccardo De Filippis among others.
‘The idea of a film with several episodes came from the fact that producing a first movie is extremely difficult for a young director and I found it easy to put together a group of script-writers (12), young directors (seven) and young actors, with less economic requirements. Not having any financial support, we turned to crowdfunding, which was successful thanks to the interest of the press. We collected 20,000 euros, which is not enough to make a movie but it was enough to attract few investors. Our budget, still very low, was 180,000 euros’.
‘With so little money we had to make the most of everything: we shot in Rome, sometimes in our homes, we helped in any possible way. We worked night and day’.
The movie is due to go out in 2016 and will go to different festivals. ‘But at the moment for us it’s important to spread the voice, like growing our Facebook page as much as possible’.
