Mindemic

Mindemic is a 2022 Italian psychological comedy drama film directed by Giovanni Basso in his directorial debut.

The film was nominated for three Golden Ciak, including Best Emerging Director, Best Lead Actor and Best Playbill.

Plot
Nino, a seventy-year-old retired film director, receives a call from his historic producer, Fredo, who commissions him to write a new screenplay. After accepting the job, Nino begins to write the script using his beloved typewriter. Driven by a strong inspiration, he decides to make an epic war film, and to find support in the writing process he gets in contact with his historical collaborators. The screenwriter De Paoli, who refuses the job, and the actor Giovanni Marino, who refuses the role that Nino offers him.

Absorbed into his own creativity, Nino begins to stage in his apartment the pages he's writing, interpreting all the characters by himself: a group of soldiers who try to save a mysterious woman during an unspecified war. Nino also receives a visit from a woman, a prostitute identical to his ex-wife Angela, who left him years before and with whom he's still in love. As Nino continues writing, he loses himself in an artistic and personal delirium, in which the memories of his life with his ex wife and with his collaborators mix with the events of the film he's developing, generating in him a short circuit in which he can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction.

When he's told by his wife that he's dead and everything he's experiencing does not exist, Nino decides to complete his screenplay anyway. After writing a twisted ending, Nino finds himself on the terrace of the apartment he has never left. Here, hand in hand with his wife, he embraces his destiny.

Cast

 * Giorgio Colangeli as Nino
 * Rosanna Gentili as Angela
 * Roberto Andreucci as De Paoli
 * Paolo Gasparini as Giovanni Marino
 * Claudio Alfredo Alfonsi as Fredo
 * Rossella Gardini as Lucia

Production
During an interview for The Hot Corn, Basso stated:"'When I wrote the script, two years ago, I wrote it for Giorgio Colangeli to play the lead, since I met him in 2018 when we worked together on one of my short films, Il Grande Presidente... So I printed a picture of him and I used it as a reference while writing the movie. Then I sent him the finished script worried he would refuse the job, given its narrative peculiarities. But just three days later Giorgio called me and he was enthusiast, he said he wanted to do it no matter what.'"

The movie was filmed in Rome inside an apartment in via Galeazzo Alessi (Tor Pignattara). It was entirely shot on an iPhone 8+ with an anamorphic lens. Basso also stated that all the phone & video calls that Nino makes in the film were recorded live and not added in post-production.

Promotion and Distribution
The official trailer was published on the Coming Soon YouTube channel on June 9, 2022, while a promotional clip of the film was published on MYmovies on June 14, 2022.

The movie was distributed in Italian cinemas on June 15, 2022. On the 19th of September 2022 it was included in the list of twelve Italian films to possibly represent Italy as a foreign language film at the 2023 Academy Awards. Since the 3rd of August 2023 the movie is available on demand on the streaming platform Chili. In June 2024 it had a limited theatrical release in Australia.

Soundtrack
As indicated in the film's credits, the soundtrack is composed entirely by the music that the Italian composer Teo Usuelli created for the 1968 film La Rivoluzione Sessuale by Riccardo Ghione, published by Universal Music Group.

Reception
The movie was positively reviewed by the critics:

"When the threads of the mind fray, when memory and action overlap and confuse, all that remains is what was there before: a newborn wrapped in a blue sky on the terrace of a new era, or at least so it seems. Now all that is left for Nino, in this confused darkness, is a sweet sway. Once again, primitives of a new era, in which the contagion disappears but the perennial diffusion of the idea of him remains, deported on a new journey, in a world with new rules and less safe. What were we like when we were men?"

"Giovanni Basso bets everything on the acting performance of Giorgio Colangeli, taking home a victory. Colangeli is the backbone of the film, supported by his physicality which reigns supreme, very rarely sharing the screen with the other actors. It is he who moves the threads of the story, becoming a Demiurge, giving airiness to a feature film which otherwise has made claustrophobia - mental and physical - its distinctive feature."

"Giovanni Basso directs a controversial, ambitious first movie (with references to Kubrick's 1953 Fear and Desire); it's cathartic, genuine, refracting and reflective, polymorphic."

"Structured as a metaphor for the artist's creative life, Mindemic was conceived during the 2020 lockdown, from which it inherits a sensation of constraint and disorientation, becoming a universal story about insecurity and the concept of abandoning all traditional schemes. Departure from the norm also highlighted by the director's choice to shoot the entire movie with an iPhone, thus exploiting the technical-artistic possibilities of the medium, such as freedom of action and its shooting agility [...]"

"Mindemic is a work that quotes openly and without any fear, that plays with déjà vu, that dips into the immense cinematic cauldron of the last eighty years to bring out Kubrick (Nino's obsessive-compulsive writing) or, as Colangeli murmurs in front of his (so to speak) Olivetti, 'Ben Hur, Fellini, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Antonioni, Cassavetes” and so on in a nostalgic delirium with potentially harmful effects."