Fabietto: I want to go to Rome to see if I'm cut out for making films.
Capuano: Rome? The great escape...Fucking distractions. In the end you come back to yourself. You come back to failure. Everything's a failure, a pile of shit. No one can escape his own failure, and no one gets out of this city. Rome... What the fuck you gonna do in Rome? Only assholes go to Rome. Do you know how many stories there are in this city?
to me paolo sorrentino's "The Hand of God" explains what films are all about. to tell our stories and to escape reality. it is a film about family affair and the coming of age of a boy but how it was crafted really felt like it's a very personal story. i watched an interview with the director where he explained how it was about his upbringing and how it was shot really on the neighborhoods he grew up in. it feels like an approach i would do if i were a filmmaker. childhood and upbringing played a major role on how we became who we are today and to be able to synthesized it into a work of art must felt really precious.
another thing that struck me was one of the ending scene where the boy is scolded by the big director and the director tried to tell him, as quoted above, that there are countless stories even where you are now, you don't need to escape to be able to tell your stories. this fondness of one's own city (in this case is sorrentino and napoli) is something i've always been envious about whenever i encounter it in literature or films. as someone with nowhere to root in and have nothing but hatred to my own hometown, i can only imagine and hope that maybe someday there will be such place.
