"I want to say that the book was born from a distant and precise idea: what would a world of children be like without adults, would they get away with it? It's true, there are coincidences: Anna is set in 2020, but she hasn't relevance to Covid. The driving force lies in the tenacity, in the hope, in the desire to succeed, which moves everything ".
This is how Niccolò Ammaniti explains how the idea of the highly anticipated Anna TV series was born (the six episodes will be available on Sky Atlantic and Now from April 23) based on his 2015 novel of the same name published by Einaudi, a Sky Original series produced by Wildside , a company of the Fremantle group, in co-production with ARTE France, The New Life Company and Kwaï.
The starting point is an epidemic, 'the Red' ("but it is on a dermatological basis, which I imagined based on my studies in biology", says the author and director), which affects all adults in the world, killing them.
Only children up to the age of puberty seem to be spared.
In reality, what Ammaniti focuses on above all is the relationship of the little ones to the 'big' world and their capacity for resilience.
The world of wild children, the one resulting from the consequences of "La Rossa", also includes Anna - the newcomer Giulia Dragotto - who lives in the Podere del Gelso, in Sicily, with her little brother, Astor (Alessandro Pecorella), who looks after her following all the instructions that her mother (Elena Lietti) left her in the Book of Important Things, when the baby is kidnapped.
Thus begins Anna's adventure journey in search of the little one, a life path: thus the impact with the Blues, a community headed by Angelica (Clara Tramontano), perfidious queen who holds Astor and La Picciridduna-Katia (Roberta Mattei), an adult hermaphrodite who survived the clean slate "of the great", who seems to have the power to save from the virus.
"After closing the novel, I spent years thinking about this story - underlines Ammaniti - about the story of this little girl in this world where she becomes a mother without being one, overcoming the limits of a meaningless place. Then I talked about it to Mario Gianani, who had the rights to the book, and we got to talk about a choral series: in addition to Anna alone, I explored other characters that were only hinted at. For the series, I was inspired by the painting The games of children by Bruegel: a square full of children it was the first visual impression of what I had to do; then, another inspiration was the film Apocalypto, which struck me for make-up and costumes ".
Ammaniti admits: "Directing has a strong charm, I think about it, I really like the visual construction, before I was more solitary".
The series is produced by Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Mieli with Lorenzo Gangarossa for Wildside, a company of the Fremantle group, in co-production with ARTE France, The New Life Company and Kwaï.
Fremantle is the international distributor.
It so happened that the shooting of the series, of which Ammaniti is the director and co-writer with Francesca Manieri, began a few months after Covid-19 arrived in Italy ("We were on the set").
Interrupted due to the lockdown, Anna's work then resumed in full emergency.
But how is a world in the hands of the little ones?
Ammaniti explains: "A world of children in which nothing is taught is ferocious".
"Well, if there is a moral in Anna it is that there can be no future without a past".
For Elena Lietti, "the legacy is in the actions of this mother, an independent woman, we see in her in a nutshell the freedom of thought and action that will later be Anna. The Book is a heroic gesture, because she senses what will come, that it contains very practical indications, but also indications regarding memory, so this mother becomes the engine ".
Giulia Dragotto defines herself as "completely different from Anna", but after having "lived together" with her for months and months, she cannot help but esteem her. "Remains of a post-apocalyptic Sicily, reconquered by nature and without adults, are the background to the journey to a new world at the center of Anna which is the second TV project of the writer Premio Strega. The music is synth-pop by Alphaville, psychedelic rock by Mercury Rev, but also the most iconic Italian one with Loredana Bertè, Mia Martini, Ornella Vanoni Nicola Maccanico (Executive Vice President Programming Sky Italy) is very proud of the result: "With the pandemic, the assonance is totally involuntary and accidental, because Anna does not talk about current events, this is the real interpretation of the series".