L' ESTATE DI GIACOMO

It’s summer in the countryside of northeastern Italy. Giacomo, 19, deaf since childhood and Stephanie, his childhood friend, 16, go to the river for a picnic. Like in an enchanted fairytale they get lost in the woods and find themselves in a heavenly place, alone and free, during an afternoon that seems to last a whole summer. An apprenticeship of senses: there is no touching, yet it is all skin, breath and sighs. The sensuality accompanies their children’s games until Stephanie and Giacomo feel the adventure that they have just experienced is nothing more than a bittersweet memory of a lost time. A story of love and initiation into adulthood where the present is mixed with memory and the past rises with the clarity and amazement of the first time. The memories are not only those that each of us carry within ourselves and suddenly remember, they are also real discoveries. We have to know that we never see things the first time, but always the second. So we discover them and remember them together.

L’estate di Giacomo is perhaps the first ever “film” that I thought of. At the time it was a story, probably a hallucination. I spent my childhood and my adolescence on the banks of the river Tagliamento: I know every smallest sensation, sound and smell. That sense of boredom and neglect is as part of me as is the sense of possible adventure; senses which characterize that natural landscape. (Alessandro Comodin)