The films by audiovisual artist Yuri Ancarani have often emerged from the interstices of documentary and fiction, but nowhere has that divide felt more porous than in his latest, Atlantide. A close-up study of teenage life on Sant’Erasmo, an island on the edges of the Venice lagoon, the film follows a smattering of teens as they fritter away their adolescence chasing each other aboard modified barchini (speedboats) in a quest to become the fastest rider this side of the Adriatic. Among them is Daniele (Daniele Barison), the closest Atlantide comes to a protagonist. A sullen teen with high cheekbones and a sorrowful gaze, his barchino races and tumultuous relationship with girlfriend Maila (Maila Dabalà) offer something of a narrative backbone Ancarani returns to in between all the film’s meanderings. But Atlantide, much like its predecessors, doesn’t unspool as a linear three-act drama so much as a succession of images and vignettes. We watch Daniele and pals idle about under sweltering summer skies; watch them turn their barchini into bullets and blast EDM tunes as they slingshot their vessels on the water, each deafening track reverberating like gunshots. This is, ostensibly, Daniele’s story, but time and again Ancarani leaves the lad to trail after other teens and capture some remote corners of the lagoon: shipwrecks, swamps, empty alleys and vaporetto stops. It’s a portrait of faces and places, one that succeeds in painting Venice less as a postcard destination than a kind of Xanadu, at once so geographically close and spiritually distant for the teens who daydream of fleeing Sant’Erasmo but can’t fully imagine what life outside it might look like.
Watching them flaunt their speedboats before girlfriends and rivals brings back memories of The Challenge, possibly Ancarani’s most famous work to date (it earned him a Special Jury Prize at the 2016 Locarno Festival). In it, the director trains his eyes on a handful of Qatari sheiks as they potter about parading their falcons, gold-plated motorbikes, and big cats—another entrancing study of ennui and rivalry. Binding the two films together is Ancarani’s interest in the relationship between his subjects and the things they fetishize as status symbols. In that sense, the way the boys dotting Atlantide show off their barchini isn’t all too different from the spasmodic attention the sheiks devote to their luxury vehicles and pets. But Ancarani’s new film feels far more wistful and melancholic; introducing the film at the Venice Film Festival, where it premiered in the Orizzonti sidebar, he called it a tale of initiation into adulthood. Except the initiation Atlantide suggests eventually morphs into a tragedy: the thirst for power that drives Daniele’s increasingly reckless races can only have self-destructive ends. And in crafting a near-symbiotic relationship between boy, boat, and water (an indissoluble man-nature bond that brought to mind the old shepherds populating Michelangelo Frammartino’s films), Atlantide captures a lagoon that looks a lot like its main character: abandoned, unfinished, forever stunted.
A couple of days after the premiere on the Lido, Ancarani and I sat together to discuss Atlantide, working with an all-teenage cast, and the film’s relationship with its predecessors.
NOTEBOOK: To my knowledge, Atlantide is the closest a film of yours has ever come to the realm of fiction. It’s still a hybrid of sorts, and there are scenes that exude a fly-on-the-wall feeling I’d experienced in some of your earlier documentaries. But I was curious to hear how you feel about the film in the context of your oeuvre at large—whether you think it marks a rupture or a continuation of the themes you’ve explored before.
ANCARANI: It’s interesting you should ask that. I was thinking about the way my work has evolved through the years. I made my debut with a short called Il capo, about a man who works in the marble quarries around Carrara. It’s still being screened today, which is kind of strange if you consider that shorts usually don’t live longer than two years, and hardly ever outside the festival circuit. But watching Atlantide, it dawned on me that my filmography should be viewed in reverse chronological order. Beginning with Atlantide as the first episode, so to speak, and Il Capo last. It’s been a long and complex research process that seems to me to begin with this last film, and to end where it all technically started. I wish there was a way to present this world of images back to front.
NOTEBOOK: That’s quite striking. Do you see many continuities between your films then?
ANCARANI: Oh yeah, absolutely. If you take Il capo, you have this close-up portrait of a man and his values, his beliefs, this singular relationship he shares with nature, with marble, with knowledge. You move to The Challenge and you witness this toxic way of educating young men, who must all be winners, and powerful. You either win or lose, which you obviously can’t afford to, because if you come home a loser you’re going to be punished. And of course, an upbringing like that can only push you to the limit, without you even noticing. As an adult, the effects echo in the things you say. Take Atlantide, when Daniele tells Maila she must never quit dreaming, and she tells him she has already. That’s the kind of stuff Daniele has heard from the adults around him. When you’re that young you just parrot whatever people say.
NOTEBOOK: Which is why you’ve called Atlantide a kind of initiation into adulthood.
ANCARANI: Precisely. And if you watch Il capo you’ll understand what kind of consequences an upbringing of that kind will have on you as an adult. I mean, here’s a man who literally destroys a mountain, and he’s proud of it!
NOTEBOOK: I was hoping you could tell me more about how you met Daniele, and how you negotiated this staggering closeness with your protagonist. How long did it take you to gain his trust?
ANCARANI: [Pauses] I don’t really know. I fell in love with his face, a gorgeous face, a face full of suffering. I thought he had the kind of look that could help me evoke the memories that we tend to erase, once we grow up. A face that sorrowful would double as a window through which an adult could retrieve things they’d forgotten about their own youth. Suffering, after all, is universal. But when I first met Daniele… I honestly had no idea what I’d end up doing with him. Plus he was just impossible to handle.
NOTEBOOK: How so?
ANCARANI: Because he just didn’t understand what we wanted to do. Working with him and the other teens required me to think outside the box. I’d ask my crew to have them all mic’d up before I arrived, and once I’d show up I’d tell them I was only going to shoot around, try some angles, just so that we could figure out how to actually film the “real” scenes. So they’d relax and start chatting. Sometimes I’d chime in and ask them something, to get them started. I knew everything about their lives and routines, so I could take part in their chats. I could throw in a “what did you guys get up to yesterday?” And film while they spoke. And then, at the end, they’d look at me and go, “so when do we start?” And I’d tell them we weren’t going to. Rehearsals were over, we could all go home. Nobody knew when the shooting started, or when it ended.
NOTEBOOK: Where exactly were you based during the shooting? Did you commute from Venice, the mainland, or…?
ANCARANI: No, no—I lived in Sant’Erasmo, the island where we shot the film. But I’d always make sure to arrive a little later than planned. After they’d been mic’d up. Here’s an anecdote for you: I remember one day I asked Daniele and Maila to show me the place where they first met. Except that same afternoon they had this massive argument, and broke up. So when I showed up they were furious at each other. Fuming. I went, “listen guys, we’re making a film here, how on earth do you expect us to go on like this? Now sit down and sort your mess. We can’t work this way anymore.” And they engaged in this long conversation, during which I just moved my camera around them, left and right, trying out new angles, “rehearsing,” as I’d always tell them. And they didn’t care about me. They acted as if I wasn’t there. Then, after a while, Daniele stood up: “Right, we’re cool. When do we start? What do you want us to do?” “Nothing,” I told him. “I’m happy you guys made up. We can all go home now.
NOTEBOOK: Did they not suspect you were up to something?
ANCARANI: They did, eventually. “Was Yuri’s film ever going to be shot?” Daniele especially began to feel uncomfortable. He felt manipulated. But the manipulation was very innocent—and it was the only way for me to bring out the truth, to truly capture his facial expressions, his gaze. We worked that way until the very end. Except for this one scene I’d been planning all along. Like I said, we didn’t have a script, just a collection of images, and there was this one I’d been toying with: two young people making love under a bridge, a “must” for all Venetians, and a staggering image in and of itself. But of course, I couldn’t go about it carelessly. There were ethical concerns at stake: yes, I wanted to stay as true to my characters as possible, but Maila was only sixteen at the time, I couldn’t have her in that scene. It was then I decided Daniele would meet up with a girl visiting town. Only I couldn’t exactly know when I’d shoot it, because he had a girlfriend—Maila. When I first mentioned the scene, I kind of expected him to be thrilled. But he just wouldn’t have it. “Who do you think I am? I have a girlfriend! Yes, things between us aren’t exactly great, but I’m with her.” True that, I thought, but I also knew relationships between people their age have quite a different, shall we say, life expectancy than those between adults. Don’t mean to be cynical here, but when I was told a couple of teens we were following had been together for a year already I kind of knew they wouldn’t be for much longer. Same goes for the boys who would place stickers of their girlfriends’ names on their boats. It’s just statistics. When Daniele and Maila did break up we all felt sad. But that also meant we managed to shoot that “professional” scene with the new girl. We brought in a larger crew, and that was his first time on a real set, so to speak.
NOTEBOOK: How did he react?
ANCARANI: The experience was fairly intense. There were many people around, and he became impossible. So much so that I was forced to leave the set myself.
NOTEBOOK: Why?
ANCARANI: Because we started arguing. We had these furious arguments.
NOTEBOOK: Was it because he couldn’t handle the pressure?
ANCARANI: Because of that beautiful, sorrowful face of his. Why do you think some of the finest actors of the past had such difficult personalities? Because they all struggled a lot. They all suffered with fatigue. Now you see actors who party their way through life and work. But you can’t rely on good looks alone to convey this or that feeling. And in Daniele, I found just the person I needed. But man, what a struggle!
Above, Daniele Barison in Atlantide
NOTEBOOK: I wanted to go back to your writing process. You said you didn’t have a script here, and I was wondering if this is a recurring approach for you. Do you work with images first and then build around them? Do you think your writing process has changed through the years?
ANCARANI: Not at all. My whole work is based on intuition. It’s my intuition that takes me to this or that place, that tells me to follow that person, shoot at that time. I’m an animal venturing into the woods, listening to the sounds around me, I feel, I’m in sync. That’s how I work, and those I work with know that. There’s a complete trust that helps us achieve wonderful things, and go places that are always new and surprising. It’s when you welcome someone new into the team that things get tricky. Because we really do work in strange, different ways, so it’s only natural for those unfamiliar with our methods to get scared. Suspicious. Sometimes they’re young (not that I’m not, ah!), or fresh off film school. They tell you what they’ve been taught, how to work, how other directors work. And that’s just devastating. It only takes an intern out of tune with the others to destroy your work environment. Because working through intuition alone means working on the edge, always.
NOTEBOOK: Do you leave a lot of room for collaboration then? I’m thinking of the writing and planning stages especially.
ANCARANI: Well, in Atlantide, Daniele and Maila helped structure the film without knowing it. But I’d given them an end-point. Nobody knew how the journey would unfold, exactly, but we did know how it’d end: with a pile in the middle of the lagoon, against which our protagonist would crash. Both of them knew what the image meant, and they gave me lots of stories, lots of ideas that could lead us in that direction. And Maila was the real genius behind the film. She’s its backbone, and what she has to say, especially in that manicure scene, I think it’s incredible. She’s supremely smart, but lives in a place that won’t help her develop her talents.
NOTEBOOK: I was thinking of what you were saying earlier, about the thematic continuities between your films. There’s an interesting parallel to be made between the wealthy sheiks of The Challenge and the teens in Atlantide. Both groups seem so prone to fetishize their possessions—whether hawks or boats—and turn them into status symbols.
ANCARANI: [Pauses] What’s the name of the guy behind Tesla?
NOTEBOOK: Elon Musk?
ANCARANI: Him. [Pauses] The main idea in Atlantide is that we’re all on the same boat. That we all wrestle with a deeply patriarchal educational system that teaches boys they must all be winners—at all costs. And that’s devastating, because they all come out of it traumatized, and carry these lessons well into adulthood. This is a system that couldn’t care less about promoting differences and idiosyncrasies among young people. That’s what makes Daniele so similar to Elon Musk. To Jeff Bezos. They’re all obsessed with missiles, with phallic symbols, things they want to throw at the sky. Boat or rocket—it’s the same. The real crazy and sad thing here is that, even as you grow old, you end up playing the same games and facing the same obsessions you had as a teen. Winning. But what kind of victory is that? Growing up only to remain obsessed with hitting 85 km per hour on your speedboat—is that really growing up at all?
Yuri Ancarani's Atlantide is showing March 17 - 23, 2022 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.