Working towards a question _{by Alessia Belsito-Riera}

Having moved to his mother’s Aotearoa from his Italian father’s loud and lively Napoli at 11 years old, filmmaker Paolo Rotondo says that he feels half New Zealander and half Neapolitan “both in blood and culture”.

“Napoli is like an open city theatre,” he says. “It feels like the whole place is always a spectacle. Us Southern Italians are very expressive, so when I came to New Zealand, I found a place in theatre that had that level of expressiveness.”

Paolo would go on to become a regular face on Kiwi screens and stages, appearing in commercials, plays, movies, and television shows the likes of Xena: Warrior Princess, Shortland Street, and The Luminaries. He would also become the artistic director of the Italian Film Festival, which celebrates its 10^th anniversary in 2025. From the festival, and its contribution to sharing Italian culture, Paolo was honoured with a Cavaliere dell’Ordine al merito della Repubblica Italiana in 2023, which is akin to being knighted or receiving a CMNZ. There is something special in store for next year’s festivities, but for now, you can immerse yourself in Italianità at this year’s festival, which is in Wellington from the 6^th of November to the 5^th of December, and by reading the interview below!

How did you make the transition from theatre to film?

When you’re starting out as an actor, work doesn’t just get given to you. As young theatre makers, we made our own work and stories. In New Zealand we don’t specialise, we do everything, which is really lucky. It all comes from the same creative source, right? When you’re acting a lot, making commercials and working on other people’s films and theatre, sometimes you want to tell stories that are more relevant to yourself, your community, or your age group, and so you end up making the stories that will speak to your generation or culture.

Speaking of, tell me about your latest film Maunga Cassino.

It’s a story based on a stage play that I wrote with Rob Mokaraka. We took our family stories, his of the Māori Battalion and mine of civilians, and created a story about the meeting of Māori and Italians during the Second World War. We made a theatre show that was full of that Italian and Māori spirit – songs, jokes, humour, and tragedy mixed together. We always wanted to turn it into a film. The New Zealand Film Commission gave us a little bit of funding to make a short film that was like a proof of concept. We took one scene of the play about the first meeting between two men who are trapped behind enemy lines and don’t share a common language. They have to learn to communicate and figure out whether they are friends or enemies through their shared humanity.

What was it like making a film about both Aotearoa and Italy?

On a real, practical level, it’s a true privilege to work in a te ao Māori way, because it adds a layer of spirit and humanity to the formal process of filmmaking that is very beautiful. We were dealing with our ancestors and the dead, and therefore there was so much care for the people who aren’t there anymore, as if they were present with us all the time. That made us feel really protected, and like we were looking after the stories of our families. Sometimes, the feeling of responsibility in telling historical stories is quite large, and you want to make sure you get it right and honour it while at the same time adding your own perspective. The Māori process helped to make sure that we were in a constant dialogue with the past, present, and future.

We also ate like Italians every day at lunch. We set up tables, sat down, had an Italian chef, Alberto Calabrese, and we had courses every day to make sure that everyone felt like we had been transported a little bit to Italy. Māori culture uses food to return back to the earthly when you’ve been inhabiting this spiritual or tapu realm, which performance and making art is. Food helps to settle you back down, so it worked perfectly.

Shifting gears, how did you get involved in the Italian Film Festival?

There had been an Italian film festival in the past, but it had ceased to be. My wife was working for the Māori Film Commission when there were two years of no Italian films showing in New Zealand. She said, ‘Paolo, I work in film, you’re a filmmaker, let’s do it’. We didn’t really know what a festival entailed, but we just started and have been learning as we’ve gone. Next year will be our 10^th year. Because we haven’t followed a structure like other festivals, we’ve been blindly and, in an idiosyncratic way, making it our own. We’ve been trying to make it personal, so it doesn’t feel like an institution. That’s one of the reasons we make it itinerant, so that I can go to as many of the openings as possible and meet the audience. That helps me connect with the Italian community all around New Zealand, because there’s not many of us as you know – siamo quattro gatti [an Italian expression that literally translates to ‘we’re four cats’, meaning we’re just a handful of people]. It’s a real privilege. We’re representing Italy’s cinema, culture, and artistic world, so it feels like the responsibility is quite high. Most of our audience is not Italian, so it’s like packaging it for a non-Italian audience and seeing if we can represent the history of Italian cinema.

On that note, how do you select your programme?

We’ve made a conscious commitment to represent the best of Italian film. We’ve only got 20 films, and Italy produces about 250 every year. We want to get a spread of the genres to represent the thematics that the nation is bringing out. The history of Italian cinema is so huge, rich, and wonderful and we try to relate that back to the present. It’s really important to get that mix of contemporary and classic. Italian films are quite hard to access at times because our market’s so small; a lot of genres don’t work here as well and there are some that are so densely particular that they don’t travel because they don’t have a cultural context. Italy’s cultural differences are so huge. We’re slowly letting the audience in on films that talk about this.

What can Wellington expect from the ninth festival?

I think it’s our strongest lineup with lots of great films. C'è ancora domani was a cultural phenomenon in Italy. It’s about the emancipation of women in post-war Italy with an homage to neo-realist filmmakers. It’s a once-every-decade kind of cinema event – films that butt into the culture and push it forward like that are rare. Then you have films like Le Otto Montagne, that won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, of such extraordinary beauty and thematic depth that it lingers for months afterwards in your spirit like the mountains themselves. On the other side of it, we have a film like L’ultima Notte d’Amore, which is a giallo: hard-boiled cops being badarse. Italian cinema is coming up with some incredible expressions of genres. Like in all great pieces of art, it’s not about creating something entirely new, but it’s about doing something special with that genre.

If you had to condense Italian cinema down into a nutshell, how would you describe it?

I have this idea that Italian cinema doesn’t operate with the same set of rules as English-speaking cinema, which is formulaic. Italian cinema is freeing because the genres are not as rigid. A comedy will have a lot of tragedy, philosophy, and politics, while a drama will have scenes of absolute hilarity. It’s a little bit more like Shakespeare, in a sense, who understood where to put scenes of levity to make the story more buoyant and reset the drama.

I find that Italian cinema imitates life in a way, right? It’s messy, it blurs, and nothing is tied up in a pretty little bow.

Exactly, I totally agree with that. I think also, because Italian history is so long, it has done everything. It’s so complicated, it doesn’t put things into black and white. So the stories are a lot more nuanced. The heroes are less in shining armour, and the motivations of antagonists are often very valid. That tension makes for good stories. Italian narratives are not as tidy. Films from the American tradition work towards a conclusion, while Italian films work towards a question. Rather than resolve your question, they leave it with you. If we’re left with an idea or a theme, we carry it with us, and maybe the artist has communicated to us more deeply. There’s no perfect thing. It’s more like over to you, audience: what would you do in that situation? How are you going to live your life?