After living 40 years abroad, Felice returns to Naples and discovers again places and codes of the city, facing a past that eats him away.

The subject of this movie was inspired by current events, but I wanted to go beyond that, towards a mysterious feeling to be searched for during filming itself. I was fascinated by the idea of ​​making a movie not inside a city, but inside a neighbourhood, as if it were a chessboard, and that’s why all the streets, houses and individuals that appear in NOSTALGIA are exclusively from the Rione Sanità neighbourhood, a Neapolitan district detached from the sea. The neighbourhood swallows everything: the distant years of the movie’s setting, the Middle East - where the protagonist has eventually ended up - , the dreams, the challenges, the faults. I invited actors and crew to immerse themselves in the neighbourhood as if it were a labyrinth, without the fear of getting lost. The camera on our shoulders, we began to walk the streets, in our interpretation of the cinema of reality. Encounter after encounter, life after life, story after story, we ended up shooting the last scene wondering what was its meaning, and we couldn’t find it. Maybe there’s no meaning, maybe there never was. There’s the labyrinth, and there’s nostalgia, which are the fate of many, and perhaps of all of us.

Mario Martone is a director of theater, cinema and opera. He created the Falso Movimento theatrical company in the 1980’s and then founded with Toni Servillo the Teatri Uniti company, through which he created his first independent films. Later, he became the director of Rome and Turin’s theaters. He has made two films set in the nineteenth century that attracted millions of viewers, staged operas in some of the world’s greatest theaters and continued to cross-breed artistic languages and experiment relentlessly. In 1999, he created the Teatro India in Rome. In 2018, the museo Madre in Naples dedicated a large personal exhibition to him. During the pandemic he adapted the Barbiere di Siviglia and the Traviata for television. He recently came back in front of a live audience with the staging Goliarda Sapienza’s Filo di mezzogiorno.

FILMOGRAPHY:
2021 - QUI RIDO IO, Feature
2019 - IL SINDACO DEL RIONE SANITÀ, Feature
2018 - CAPRI- REVOLUTION, Feature
2014 - IL GIOVANE FAVOLOSO, Feature
2010 - NOI CREDEVAMO, Feature
2004 - L'ODORE DEL SANGUE, Feature
1998 - TEATRO DI GUERRA, Feature
1997 - LA SALITA, Feature
1995 - L'AMORE MOLESTO, Feature
1993 - RASOI, Feature