Born in 1987, Joe Juanne Piras studied directing and film production at the National Academy of Cinema in Bologna, and earned a Philosophy degree with top marks. After directing short films and documentaries that were awarded at numerous festivals (such as Dalia, shown at the Sarajevo Film Festival) and after launching the Andaras Traveling Film Festival, Piras decided to tackle his first feature-length fiction: the result of this effort is titled Dal Nulla, a psychological thriller starring Selene Caramazza, which arrives in Sardinian cinemas from November 4, and will then continue its journey across the country, with a Rome preview already scheduled for the 11th of the same month at the Cinema delle Provincie.
The film’s story—written by the director in collaboration with Francesca Maria Scanu and produced by La Sarraz Pictures, in co-production with Canada Inc and with the support of Red Collision Colombia—begins with the disappearance of a girl and the death of a young woman, delving into the mechanisms of memory, childhood traumas, and the silences of a small community. At the center is Sara, a writer of dark fairy tales who returns to the village of her childhood after the death of Alice, a friend found lifeless in a forest, just as a little girl disappears in the same place. Two seemingly separate events, but linked by a secret that Sara will attempt to reveal, forcing her to confront a past she believed forgotten.
Here is what Piras said about his film, which, through the language of thriller, aims to address themes such as child abuse, the surfacing of the repressed, and the difficulty of facing what one has lived and what the director has filmed in the inland of his homeland, Fluminimaggiore, a territory made of woods, mountains, fog, and small towns, far from the bright, seaside image of the Sardinian island, where the present coexists with popular beliefs, ancient rituals, and stories passed down through the ages:
“Speak about the deepest contradictions of the human mind through the filter of genre cinema. Driven by this need, together with Francesca, I decided to write Dal Nulla: we wanted to dig into the characters and address themes such as abuse of minors and the emergence of the repressed through a narrative that did not renounce suspense, tension, and entertainment. At the heart of the film, a universal theme: without facing one’s past it is impossible to grow, transform, or live. I did not want to tell the luminous and summery island of the most well-known imagination, nor build an artificially dark version of it. I was interested in an inland Sardinia, cold, gray: forests, mountains, fog, small towns, large spaces in which the presence of man sometimes seems almost provisional.”
In the film’s cast, alongside Selene Caramazza, we find Riccardo Lai, Lucho Velasco, Syama Rayner, Ryan Bommarito, Lia Careddu, Felice Montervino, Giuseppe Boy, Maria Teresa Campus, Emilio Puggioni, Silvio Orvieto, Daniel Dwerryhouse, and Fiorenzo Mattu. The cinematography is by Sammy Paravan, while the music is by Emanuele Contis, a Sardinian composer whose work helps build the atmosphere and the psychological dimension of the narrative.
Here is the trailer for Dal Nulla.
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