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Fr
September 2007. From her home in Sweden, Fred moves to Trieste on the Adriatic Sea with her father, who has taken a new management job in the Northeastern Italian city. Feisty and curious, she enrols in the local Technical High School for her Senior Year, finding herself as the only girl in an all-male class. She quickly becomes the centre of attention, especially for three friends : the fascinating and reserved Antero, the outgoing womanizer Pasini, and the sweet and protective Mitis. The three have been a unit for as long as they can remember. Fred’s arrival disrupts their equilibrium and puts their longstanding friendship to the test. As each of the boys secretly desires Fred for himself, she yearns to be accepted into their circle and become one of them. But to truly belong, she is asked to sacrifice more and more.
What was the main challenge of this project ?
Inès Tabarin : This film is closely linked to the city of Trieste. First of all, the novel is set there. In adapting it, Laura Samani (who herself comes from the city) simply appropriated the plot and transposed it to 2007, the time of her own adolescence. Not knowing the city, I first had to discover it, and then transpose it into a form that evokes memories from 20 years ago. Finding that kind of middle ground between the past and the present in the image. In any case, not exaggerating or using overly dramatic effects.
How was the film prepared ?
IT : I met Laura through the film’s French co-producer (Thomas Lambert, TOMSA Films). Once the film was launched, and given the prominence of the city in the book and the screenplay, we decided to organize several trips with Laura to the location to figure out how to translate the project into images. Since the story takes place over a full year, there was also the challenge of conveying the seasons on screen. We decided to shoot it in two parts, one at the end of summer and one in the middle of winter. So I went there for three to four days in May and July before settling there in August before filming began, allowing Laura and me to visit possible locations and discuss the image of the past she had in mind. When I arrived, I realized that the city had a personality all its own. Surrounded by seven hills overlooking the Adriatic Sea, it is very close to both the mountains and the sea, with a very different and permanent horizon. The light is also special. It’s a northern light, a mountain light... not at all like the warm colors you find in Tuscany, for example. In fact, it feels more like being on the shore of a lake in northern Italy or Switzerland...
The other key factor in the making of the film was the casting. With the exception of the lead actress (the young Stella Wendick), all the roles were given to non-professionals, who were spotted in the region during open castings. This decision allowed Laura to focus on authenticity in the dialogues. The actors chosen were fluent in the Friulian dialect, which is sometimes difficult for other inhabitants of the peninsula to understand. That ’s why the film was subtitled in Italian when it was screened in Venice. She therefore undertook lengthy rehearsals, particularly with our four young lead actors, to finalize the film’s dialogue, rewriting the script to incorporate their local expressions and anchor them in the period.
The film is marked by a great sense of nostalgia. For the era, and also for the place...
IT : I found this city very nostalgic. Modernity has not changed it too much. The past often emerges at every street corner, which made the choice of locations quite easy. The difficulty came mainly from the fact that production conditions did not allow us to shoot in two sessions as planned.
So everything was done in one go at the end of summer 2024, with our mission being to make the scenes in the middle of the film look like winter. To do this, I developed two different LUTs, combined with two sets of lenses that I had been able to test during my stays in Trieste. In this case, the Canon K35 series for everything that takes place in the fall and spring. This choice went well with the rather warm image that made use of the late summer sun we were lucky enough to have during filming, even though the weather conditions were often difficult, with a lot of rain and stormy weather. And the Zeiss GO series for the sequences supposed to take place in winter, accompanied by a second LUT, colder and desaturated. The film was shot on Alexa 35, using a setting of 500 ISO for the summer part, and pushing the sensitivity to 1600 for the winter.
Can you give me a little more detail about how these two image styles were constructed ?
IT : I always kept apertures between f/2.8 and 4 on both lens series to avoid focus issues between characters in the depth of field. I also found that the rendering of these two sets of vintage lenses was really too soft at full aperture for this film, combined with the Alexa 35 sensor—which is otherwise really interesting for textures and especially highlights on Caucasian skin.
To create the two LUTs, Laurent Ripoll and I started with a Kodak 5219 500T transfer : for the Summer LUT, we created a fairly classic contrast, with a contrasted S-curve with a compressed curve foot and a folded curve shoulder. For Winter, we stiffened the curve base and folded the highlights very sharply to handle the high dynamics quite strongly.
In terms of color casts, the Summer look was slightly blue in the lows, green in the mids, and golden in the highs. For the Winter look, we removed the gold from the highs to make the highs and mids cold, and we cut the color casts in the lows so that it wouldn’t be monochromatic.
In terms of color volume, we stayed true to the 5219 for the Summer look, but we lowered the saturation compression to make it pop a little more, while adding color density to make those same saturations darker (otherwise we risked a flashy digital look, which I generally want to avoid).
For the winter look, we started with the color volume of the 5219, but added a lot of bleach bypass.
All this was done with Diachromie (a tool developed by Les Films de la Chapelle) which, in this case, allows us to use bleach bypass to choose certain aspects of this technique and, in the case of this film, to avoid over-contrast (because we wanted to keep that soft whiteness of winter by the sea).
In terms of texture, we slightly reduced the grain in the summer section, and in terms of halation and frequency separation, we kept the 35mm reference for both looks, as we didn’t want to go for something very old-fashioned or exaggerated with 16mm grain, for example.
Laura and Julien Petri, the film’s colorist, also spent a day changing the green of the vegetation according to the time period of the narrative.
Alongside the development of the LUTs, I must also give credit to the costume designer, Loredana Buscemi, who did a lot of research on colors, developing the wardrobe with the help of references we made with Federica Bologna, the production designer, using the collaborative platform Miro.
Why the 1.5 format ?
IT : Initially, we really thought we would shoot the film in 2.39 to make the most of the atmosphere in Trieste and be able to get some beautiful shots of the group of four. I was thinking in particular of those exterior shots from the hills, with the view of the Adriatic and the horizon I mentioned.
But as we scouted locations and preparations progressed, we realized that composing wide-format shots was often inappropriate. The high school setting, for example, wasn’t at all suitable, and the regular presence of our four actors in most scenes also posed framing challenges. From a storyboarding perspective, Laura had also talked to me a lot about Cédric Klapisch’s Péril jeune, which she considered a kind of reference point for stories about adolescence. Watching it again, I realized how often the imagery in this film is very frontal, with almost no profiles. And that’s exactly what Laura wanted for her film. Being with them, looking them in the face. Another pictorial reference that guided us enormously was the work of German photographer Josh Kern. He is an artist who offers photos of his daily life, mainly taken with a simple compact film camera with a very organic rendering. Grain, often a single light source, and sometimes blurring. So it was from these 24x36 photos (135 film roll) that the idea came to us, and we chose to shoot the film in this format, which is ultimately very versatile. Depending on the scene, we can easily have just one character in the frame, and it works without leaving too much space around them. Or, on the contrary, we can bring in bits of other people’s bodies, and that works very well too. All in all, it’s a much more versatile format for this story with four protagonists !
In terms of lighting, what defines the era for you ?
IT : In 2007, LED lighting had not yet taken over the world. So, with my Gaffer, Etienne Lesur, we tried to favor HMIs and tungsten sources in most of the scenes for the film. We only used LED projectors for exteriors when access to power required it for technical reasons. Or for a few interiors for effects, such as in the birthday scene in the cabin on the water. For example, the bar where the young people regularly meet is lit entirely with tungsten. Small 300W lights clipped high up, and spotlights on the tables.
The night sequence where Pasini’s character walks alone by the sea marks a break in both the visuals and the narrative. We leave the group and Fred’s character behind. It’s a more introspective scene...
IT : This scene was shot on the edge of a bay overlooking the sea with lots of rocks. It was quite a long journey, with a stuntman, extras’ cars... all on a national road leading to Croatia. We were only given three hours to shoot it and complete the sequence. With no budget for a balloon, I turned to a series of Asteras placed in the water, on the other side of the guardrail, providing light that came from below.
An HMI was placed in the distance, reflecting off a canvas frame to create a slight nighttime atmosphere. Finally, two tungsten PAR spotlights were installed on a vehicle with a generator to simulate car headlights. I remember that this was a sequence we discussed at length with Laura. Originally, the script included an additional night sequence, which was cut during editing, in which the three other protagonists returned by bus and saw the flashing lights of the emergency services on the way. Ultimately, the decision to stay with Pasini’s character alone gives the scene much more gravity. Like the sequence where Fred discovers his name savagely tagged on the school wall, these two scenes really had to convey the loss of innocence, their loneliness, the transition to adulthood...
The film is also marked by long camera movements. Like the opening and closing shots...
IT : These two shots echo each other. The first, more subjective, marks Fred’s arrival at the high school. The last, on the contrary, follows her as she walks away, in profile on the stairs, transformed. In short, we were her, and finally we see her. Proof that Laura is a filmmaker of geography and movement. Her previous film, Piccolo Corpo (selected for Critics’ Week at Cannes in 2021), was also an “initiatory road trip” through 19th-century Italy. We followed a female character from an island to the mainland, entirely shot handheld, in the midst of nature. In "Un anno di scuola", the question was more about how to maintain this staging of movement and wandering with three times as many characters. As the returning locations inherent in a school year was another challenge. To organize the geography of the narrative, we relied on a kind of grammar in reference to the tone of the scenes. For example, the Steadicam (operated by Katia Hamnane) when Fred is there, to convey the kind of hypnosis she induces in the three boys.
Or rather, the shoulder when emotion takes over, with several variations (handheld camera, wheelchair, etc.) depending on the setting. These were staging choices that Laura adopted from the outset and to which she adhered very strictly throughout the film.
(Interview by François Reumont for the AFC)
