Antonio Bigini on his debut The Properties of Metals, featuring David Pasquesi (Angels & Demons, Groundhog Day) and Martino Zaccara, a competitor and world premiere in the Berlinale 2023 and on his road from communication scientist to filmmaker.

The movie revolves around a 12-year-old Italian boy (Pietro) approached by a scientist as a study case regarding the kid’s possible abilities to bend metals with his mind. Growing up without a mother and to a severe father, the kid starts to get closer attention when he is offered to compete in a well-prized American competition that would pay off his dad’s massive debts. Naturally, the story spreads quickly in the Italian village of the 70s-80s, and the pressure on the kid highly influences his performance and relationship with the other kids in the town.

Debut Film & Competition

After a Q&A session at the 73rd Berlinale, where he partially shared this debut experience, director and screenplay writer Antonio Bigini spoke closely for Bohema, confessing that this is his first fiction film.

“As I told you (earlier), I did very little, and this film was entirely a debut.”

Not just this, but he’s never studied anything similar to filmmaking. He studied communication science, but with love for filmmaking which he partially accomplished in his previous documentaries, Bigini finally convinced various Italian film fonds institutions to trust him with his first film.

“I heard the story since I was a kid,” Antonio Bigini says. “I had the idea of turning it into a film many years ago, which took me seven years to finalize.”

The movie had a low budget of 700.000 EUR, but the director expressed that if he had done it with a slightly higher budget, that wouldn’t have forced him to cut out parts of the screenplay.

“The producer Claudio Giapponesi had never done a fiction film before.” Bigini continues. “So I told him, with whom I worked on the documentaries, let’s try to make this fiction together. We wanted a cast with a documentary appearance. On set, we were like a big family.”

“We tried not to have too many professionals with pyramidical hierarchies.”

Even though the movie is entirely in the Italian language and territory, Antonio Buil Pueyo, who plays the father of Pietro, is a Spanish actor who lives in Switzerland.

“I couldn’t find an Italian actor with that strong face as he has it. Most Italian actors don’t have that strong face of someone who has lived in the village all their lives,” explains Bigini.

Smells Like Memories

Humble, just like the person who created it, the movie takes the audience to a different place. To the best site, everyone remembers the happiest time of their lives: childhood.  The dominating bright-brick color of it, masterfully mixed with splendid costumes from 50 years back, creates a certain mood that smells like nostalgia and undoubtedly reminds the audience of Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso.

With an upcoming Italian open-to-public premiere, The Properties of Metals promises the revitalization of the Italian cinema as we know it from the past generations.