I found and translated this article about the movie Si Può Fare in comingsoon.it and I hope you enjoy it.
The director (Giulio Manfredonia) defines the film as a “true fairy tale” where the reality, that of the cooperative of ex mental patients released from hospitals because of the Basaglia Act, mixes fantasy with fiction. “For the first time I found myself telling a true story and I tried to do it with humility and respect (my note – he succeeded)”, said Manfredonia. His portrait of the courageous adventure of the trade unionist Nello, who in the 80s transformed a community of mentally ill patients into parquet floor experts is also an example of great thoroughness. The director has in fact made his actors undergo a year of tests and research. WIth professional interpreters he visited and observed carefully the cooperative Noncello di Pordenone, of which the film is based, and visited a mental health center not far from Milan.
“Our work is meticulous”, explained Andrea Gattinoni, who played a man with autism in Si Può Fare. “For me, for example, it was extremely difficult to play a man who couldn’t talk, even frustrating at times. I studied closely many autistic people and I learned that they say “no” all the time to everything you ask them.”
“As Miriam, my character, I adored Julio Iglesias”, said Daniela Piperno. ” I had to listed to listen to the songs over and over again. Now, every time I hear a song on the radio, I think of insane asylums.
In the role of the impassioned and generous Nello, a man who is positive, modern and creative, is Claudio Bisio. In the film he’s the boyfriend of Sara, a beautiful girl who works in the field of fashion and who is played by Anita Caprioli. Speaking of his character Bisio said, “Knowing Manfredonia, I thought that he’d be working in the Stanislavski method of acting (actors create their own thoughts and emotions of the characters). Instead he worked a lot with the kids who played the mentally ill people, leaving Anita and I to work by ourselves. For me all it took was a day on the set with the other actors who were behaving in every moment like their characters to get me into my part.
Anita Caprioli concentrated instead on the contradictions of Sara, that on the one hand has to reconcile her past as a liberal of the sixties with her work in the in the bourgeois world of fashion. “Sara never interacts with the mentally ill”, explained Caprioi. “She stays apart, limiting herself to being near to her boyfriend. So I worked a lot with Claudio on our characters, a couple that gets along well but is also very turbulent.
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