LaLa

Documentary

Credits

• Written & Directed by Ludovica Fales
• Cinematography Valentia Summa
• Original Music Bruno Franceschini
• Sound Gian Domenico Petillo
• Costumes Sara Marcucci
• Production Design Brunella De Cola
• Sound Mix Mikael Barre
• Video Post Production Gianandrea Sasso

ADDITIONAL CREDITS

MORE INFO

• Selected for Biennale College 2017 – in production
• LaLa @ Facebook
• Instagram @lalathefilm

FESTIVALS

May 2023 – Bellaria – Bellaria Film Festival – My Movies Audience Award

July 2023 – Turin – Afro&Roma Festival 

July 2023 – Siracusa – Ortigia Film Festival – Special Mention

January 2024 – Trieste – Trieste Film Festival – Corso Salani Award 

Screenings

All past and upcoming screenings can be found here

Web www.lalathefilm.com

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/lalathefilm

Instagram @lalafilm

MEDIA

LaLa

2023, Length 85′, Format 1.78:1 – 2K – Color

Documentary

Lala, Samanta and Zaga are the same age, they share the same desires and dreams. They are three new Italian citizens, Italy does not recognize them because their parents were born elsewhere. Their stories take shape, and intertwine, in the three layers of a collective tale in search of citizenship for one - and many - undocumented teenagers.

Lala looks in the mirror of her invisibility and crosses the fragments of her suspended identity. She crosses the story of Samantha, the non-professional actress who plays her role, and that of Zaga, the real girl who inspired this film. In a fluid state between fiction and reality, Lala embarks on a collective journey in search of the identity of a generation with denied rights. In a kaleidoscope of intersecting stories, the film becomes the manifesto of a generation, a mosaic of voices of boys and girls who are all Lala.

Directing Notes

Lala is the story of a second generation teenage migrant girl, born in Rome, torn between the values of her family of origin and those brought to her by her school life and her urban culture. Lala is also a young teenage mother, with responsibilities far greater than those of the average teenager, responsibilities for which she is not always ready and which push her sense of motherhood to the limit. Suspended between tragic humor and minimal and precious poetry that comes from reality, the first layer of this story is, therefore, an angry tale, about an apparently benevolent system and unable to see its own distorted logic. A coming of age story, in which Lala is confronted with the most classic rite of passage – the eighteenth birthday – as a transition towards maturity and towards the deepest questions related to motherhood, while struggling for recognition by society – her run to get a document. Lala’s story is inspired by the life of Zaga, a very young girl I met ten years ago in a Rome camp. I had the chance to be very close to her for a long time before she abruptly fled, after all attempts to get her papers failed. After thinking about the best way to tell the core of Lala’;s story, the struggle to obtain papers in the country where she was born and raised, so I decided to make it into a film inspired by reality. I believed this was the best process to convey the truth more deep at the heart of his story, since she was not there and disappeared without a trace. The construction of the film is profoundly linked to the very experience of its creation. The second documentary level reveals, in fact, the mechanism through which the level of fiction was developed and represents the antidote to the story itself, becoming primary and revealing all the deep and complex truth behind the story. While we were filming and improvising around the story during these months, we also learned ways of being together that challenged the norm of our lives, the norm that basically makes everyone in contact only with their immediate neighbors. This space for the challenge of the norm, through the challenge of the relationship between fiction and reality, also represents for the public an interlocutory space, a space for active reflection on the relationship between what is evident and what is hidden. I started working on the story with a group of non-professional actors, who challenged the script, changed it, added their stories and co-created the film space with me. Each of the people who participated in this process is was, therefore, a necessary and irreplaceable fragment of a project whose various layers had to coexist together to show how we found, rediscovered and reflected on the meaning of history, constantly mirroring it in reality and seeking more truth in acting. Ours was a collective search for truth , the search for a shared – and therefore public – sometimes intimate, but always deliberately collective truth.