"I can't detach myself from the history of my family, I'm sorry, I thought about my mother, my brother, luckily I have 'holy' Rosa (he says, turning to his wife sitting among the journalists, namely Rosa Caracciolo, pseudonym of Rózsa Tassi ex Hungarian pornographic model and actress)".
This is how the porn star Rocco Siffredi explains the tears aroused by the question about destiny and family this morning in Berlin.
The occasion was the world premiere at the Berlinale Special of Supersex, a seven-part series inspired by his life ("98%" he says himself) which will debut on Netflix on 6 March 2024 with Alessandro Borghi as the protagonist.
And still moved, Siffredi concludes: "I have proudly been a man who is an object for women and I don't say this with vanity, but with my head held high. To have all this, however, I paid a high price".
It all begins in the sixties when Rocco Tano, a simple boy from Ortona who would become the most famous porn star in the world much later than Rocco Siffredi, is just a poor child in love with Tommaso, the oldest and most cursed of his brothers (Adriano Giannini), engaged to the most beautiful in the country, Lucia (Jasmine Trinca).
But the child also loves Supersex, a pornographic comic that is his Linus cover.
Rocco will discover at a certain point that he too has the same superpower as the comic, that of an exuberant sexuality inevitably destined to influence his entire life.
"This series also tells the story of the evolution of porn which was great and beautiful in the Eighties and Nineties with Moana Pozzi and Cicciolina - says Siffredi -, then there was an industrialization of porn. With the advent of the Internet it changed everything there is no longer the choice to do porn as a vocation, but only to make money. It is as if we have entered a pre-future dimension, the natural, true vocation has been over for 15 years."
"I have always used my body without any difficulty and this has happened since I was a child - says Borghi who found himself acting naked hundreds of times for Supersex - My first sexual education was through porn. After all, much of what what we find out about sex comes from gym locker rooms or school desks. This series thus gave me the opportunity to question myself and my sexual education. The difficulties, if anything - concludes the actor - were other, emotional ones: I always asked if Rocco Siffredi would recognize himself in that scene, I didn't want to just make an imitation of it."
Jasmine Trinca then says, who among other things is on the international jury of this edition of the Berlinale: "Lucia, the partner of Tommaso, Rocco's guide brother who at a certain moment makes her prostitute, allowed me for the first time to give voice to a profound thought: that of escaping one's destiny, of making an act of enormous freedom".
While Giannini, who plays the tormented Tommaso, underlines: "When they proposed it to me I wanted to run away, I was very scared. Tommaso is a very complex character, starting from the dialect, a man without skin who looks like Hamlet, a bipolar character" .
Finally, one of the three directors, Francesca Mazzoleni, explains why the voice over uses such high tones: "Rocco is the excess of masculinity that this voice brings to a higher level of awareness. Rocco is his 'cock' - she concludes - they are then a mythopoetic fact."
In the cast of the series - created and written by Francesca Manieri, produced by Lorenzo Mieli for The Apartment and by Matteo Rovere for Groenlandia and directed by Matteo Rovere, Francesco Carrozzini and Francesca Mazzoleni - also: Saul Nanni (Rocco boy), Enrico Borello (Gabriele ), Vincenzo Nemolato (Riccardo Schicchi), Gaia Messerklinger (Moana), Jade Pedri (Sylvie) and Linda Caridi (Tina).
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