FOOD IN MY FILMS

AN INTERVIEW WITH PUPI AVATI

"In the Italy I come from - the Italy of the 1930s - food was one of the first things you offered a stranger. A meal and a place to sleep, the basic elements of survival. So it’s inevitable that “food” is featured in many of my films.
In Storia di ragazzi e di ragazze - which was the story of how my parents met and got married, given that my father came from an upper-middle-class family and my mother was from humble stock - food is the catalyst that allows two different social classes to become acquainted. Twenty-eight people sit down to dine and the menu is the tool that triggers emotions and sensations, evoking kindred feelings or creating dislikes.
In Noi tre about a fourteen-year-old Mozart living in the Emilian countryside, the food theme is taken to extremes. Count Pallavicini annually celebrates his holdings by eating a bowlful of his own soil, along with everything in it: roots, worms…
Italian cinema has often dealt with food during its history. Food reveals a character’s psychological make-up, social status and cultural background, though this may not be so true today, in this more homogenised age.
To me, family means one thing: my mother. But obviously there’s a natural association between food and family. And I have never really detached myself from the family I was born into, growing up in the 1940s, with the principles of that time. These were not ideological principles - many Italian families steered clear of those - but Christian-catholic, common-sense values, which I passed on to my own children and above all, reflected in my films.
Lately I’ve felt a need to focus on the father figure. The protagonist in La cena per farli conoscere is the father of three daughters by three different mothers. As a father he’s totally inadequate. Whereas in Il papà di Giovanna, the father is overprotective, devoting all his energy and imagination to making his daughter happy. The third father, in my latest film Il figlio più piccolo, is the worst of all those I’ve brought to the screen. He’s a property developer with a completely virtual financial empire, a house of cards. When the taxman and the courts start breathing down his neck, he is persuaded to sign over everything he has - hassles included - to the son he’d left in Bologna, whom he hasn’t seen in sixteen years. My films are never exposés;  I don’t feel I can point my finger at anyone or anything. Because before I do, as my mother always reminded me, I “look at myself in the mirror”. It’s that classic saying about ‘casting the first stone’. Even totally despicable individuals to whom cheating and betraying comes naturally, whose actions you could never justify, can be understood (not absolved, mind you) if they are treated with compassion. Because one day I could find myself in their shoes. My films don’t judge; they observe. And that goes for the father in “Il figlio più piccolo” as well."

A selection of trailers for Pupi Avati’s films

Gli amici del Bar Margherita 01 DISTRIBUTION, 2008
La seconda notte di nozze 01 DISTRIBUTION, 2005
Il nascondiglio 01 DISTRIBUTION, 2007
La rivincita di Natale Medusa, 2004
Il testimone dello sposo FILMAURO, 1997
Il cuore altrove 01 DISTRIBUTION, 2003
Ma quando arrivano le ragazze? 01 DISTRIBUTION, 2005
La cena per farli conoscere Medusa, 2007
Il papà di Giovanna Medusa, 2008