Lala was born in Italy but has always lived with the nightmare of citizenship not arriving, she is the daughter of refugees from the conflict in the former Yugoslavia and even if helped by social services, hers is a struggle in the labyrinths of bureaucracy common to the so-called second generations .
Furthermore, she is Roma, with all that she socially means for this unrecognized ethnic minority in Italy.
Lala gives the title to the film by Ludovica Fales, which has just won the Corso Salani award in Trieste and is in some cinemas throughout Italy accompanied by the director and protagonists, after a premiere in Rome with the concert of Assalti Frontali (feat. Luca D 'Aversa) who composed the special musical track 'Lala my name is Lala' for the film.
The film tells true, personal and at the same time symbolic stories of what it means today for young people aged around 18 to live without citizenship having grown up in the camps and often without documents from their families of origin who fled Bosnia.
With non-professional actors and through a sort of laboratory even during filming in search of the truth beyond acting, the film with an all-female team is a Transmedia (Italy) and Staragara (Slovenia) production developed by Biennale College Cinema.
Fales' project began 10 years ago when she met Zaga, a girl born and raised in a camp on the eastern outskirts of Rome, where she also went to school.
When, after various attempts to obtain the documents, she understood, upon reaching the age of majority, that her application would not be successful, she left clandestinely to reach Serbia where she was able to obtain the citizenship of her family of origin and return in Italy to apply for a permanent residence permit, which has not yet arrived.
In the film there is her (Zaga Jovanović) in a sort of mirror with the protagonist Lala played by Samanta Paunković (who instead recently obtained Italian citizenship and recently had a little girl who is growing up together with her partner) and Rahma a girl Syrian played by Ivana Nikolić who now lives in Germany with her Serbian husband, teaches Roma dances, is an activist and has become a playwright and performer.
And then other characters, the lawyer, the criminal, the schoolmates whose roles are played by people who themselves have emblematic experiences, like a sunny and positive young man who voluntarily grew up in a family home, like an activist from Lucca who he fights for the rights of his ethnic group, like the puppeteer who teaches Roma culture at university.
Why did you choose to tell Lala's story?
"I grew up - replies Ludovica fales - in a family characterized by a crossroads of interests, with a strong cosmopolitan propensity for narrative and the novel, which has been kept alive over the years by the two great figures in my life, Angela, my grandmother, and Regina, her older sister. Having fled from Italy to the United States during the racial laws, these women were saved thanks to the generosity of complete strangers, and lived, united by a deep bond, between the two shores of the Atlantic Ocean for life. When I met Zaga, the girl who inspired the story of 'Lala', I understood that, despite our profound differences and my absolutely privileged life compared to hers, we had something in common. We have in common that feeling shared by those he feels he was born by chance, 'the survivors' as the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, who survived the Nazi extermination camps, would define them in the famous essay".
Ludovica Fales (her documentaries include Letters from Palestine) has taught cinema in Bosnia, Kosovo and the Middle East as a form of conflict resolution and in support of the strong female voices she has encountered, she now teaches at University College London and is writing her new movie.
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