09/10/2002 - Young Italian director is putting the finishing touches to his fourth feature, Liberi. A story about escaping our daily humdrum existence

Having started the post-production work on Gabriele Muccino’s latest film, Domenico Procacci production and distribution company, Fandango, is producing Gianluca Maria Tavarelli’s latest film entitled Liberi (“Free”).
Shooting began on 19 August on location in Pescara and its surrounding countryside, Rome and the Gran Sasso National Park in Abruzzo and the film is almost in the can. Based on a story by Angelo Carbone that was adapted for the screen by Tavarelli and is long-time writing partner Leonardo Fasoli (Qui non è il paradiso), Liberi is a familial story featuring “a number of honest and realistic characters” where the family unit is portrayed both as love and a prison, a desire to escape but also to return.
Liberi is the story of different worlds that meet, clash and separate. Cenzo, the paterfamilias (Luigi Maria Burruano) is a man in his fifties who has just lost his factory job, his wife deserts him and not surprisingly, he begins to feel that he is no use to anyone anymore. After his girlfriend leaves him, Cenzo’s 22-year-old son, Vince (Elio Germano), decides to make a new life for himself in Pescara where he meets a 22-year-old waitress called Genny (Nicole Gramaudo) who shares Vince’s dreams of freedom and would love to become a ballerina. The unlikelihood of that happening gives rise to frequent panic attacks.
The result is “a storm that brings old and long-hidden problems and misunderstandings to the fore but it also allows each character to realise that they are members of a family and can thus help one another should the need arise,” said Burruano.
“All of us are searching for freedom; individual freedom that allows each and every one of us to discover who we are and who we would like to become but also freedom in the sense of distancing ourselves from society’s impositions,” explains Tavarelli.
At first glance Liberi is very different from Tavarelli’s previous work “there’s no doubt that it is different from the stylistic point of view rather than the subject. It is about the characters rather than events. And that is a feature of my films that I want to hang on to”. Liberi was made with a budget of approximately Euros1.7million and is scheduled for release in March 2003.

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