In places where everything was taken away from people who had little to begin with, and of which only memories remain. In his long-awaited feature debut, Massi paints a mosaic of fragments of personal stories that are not part of official history. Stories of violence, deprivation, but also of resistance.
"Simone Massi spent twelve years working on his impressive feature film debut, which consists of 40,000 hand-drawn individual images. Invelle perfectly expresses Massi’s dedication to the craft of animation as well as his dedication to depicting a past, rural life. The original title Invelle derives from the regional dialect of the Marche, a region in central Italy, and roughly translates as “no place”."
- Sara Sabatelli
Director's Statement
In the part of the world where I was born and raised there is nothing important to see and remember, nothing that could be considered worthy of ending up in a book. A sort of “Nowhere,” a non-place from which history has demanded and taken everything that it wanted and could. In exchange for that history we have gotten stories, the kind that are either passed on orally or are lost.
[From short film to feature-length…] It felt like switching form a haiku to a novel. We had plenty complications, and it took a while to find the right workflow. Working on my film, what’s been hardest was to conceive each scene as a short film in itself, and keeping the whole film together with a single thread, an articulated screenplay, which is something I hadn’t worked with before. Feature-length films forced me – and I did welcome this – to test myself on a deeper level of writing, which turned out to be a daydream. It was high time I tried something new, something different.