“My grandmother took an infinite amount of time to cook, it was a calm, sensitive country life”

I left Rome and my family at 23. It took me this time to break away from my parents and overcome my fear of going abroad. I landed in France, in an apartment in Paris, rue Gambetta. Sébastien was my roommate, our love story began a few months later. The first summer we were together, a friend asked me to do the second camera for his documentary about Sicilian fishermen.

I had studied literature, history and the arts, a little cinema and theater, but I had never done that. We went to Lampedusa, on a “working vacation”, me with a camera, Sébastien with his light table, to draw and produce an animated short film. My first day of filming was disastrous: I was seasick and spent the day throwing up. Unable to get back on the boat, I started filming Sébastien working in silence, singularly lit by his table. This resulted in my first short film, Read it.

Subsequently, we often worked together. Perhaps this is where we get along best, we can speak with one voice, even when we disagree. Linda wants chicken! is our first feature film, a common space, nourished by our ideas and our desires, the mix of our cultures and our backgrounds, everything we have seen and experienced together.

A universal and personal film

We were trying to describe a paradigm: a city which represents all cities, between the city and the countryside, a strike as an idea of ​​a strike. To have this level of universality, drawing is ideal: we can transcend the time, the place, the subject. The injustice suffered by the little girl [Linda], the dish she asks for as reparation, the relationship to family, to happiness, to sadness, to death, all of this is universal, but also very personal. It speaks of my father, who did not know his parents, of my mother, always busy and often absent during my childhood, of my peasant grandmother, with whom my brothers and I spent a lot of time.

When my mother cooked for us, it was quick recipes, sausages in a pan with tomato sauce and canned beans. While my grandmother took forever to cook. It was two worlds apart, hectic urban life versus a calm, sensitive country life. My grandmother could barely read and write, she spoke little, boiled the sheets, put cologne in the beds. And spent his time cooking.

The recipe for chicken with peppers, attributed in the film to Linda’s late father, is his. This is a popular recipe, not found in restaurants in Italy. We always ate it the next day, because it has to simmer for a long time so that the chicken absorbs the flavors of the sauce. A recipe for slowness, which also represents family happiness, Sunday lunch in France. A dish that is shared, that unites, that restores.