Where it was filmed 'L'infinito'

L'infinito, Umberto Contarello's first work, shot in stark black and white, is set in a Rome that proffers unexpected and singular encounters.

It tells the life of a successful screenwriter collapses around him like an earthquake; leaving him with nothing and barely surviving. L’infinito is the story of this survivor’s wandering and painful days as he tries to salvage a meaning to his existence. He tries to find a job although his career is in irreversible decline, he tries to rebuild his relationship with his daughter destroyed by the recent divorce, he tries to help a talented young screenwriter. He adapts to his new house, too spacious and empty for his solitude, he tackles the bureaucratic tasks he has always avoided. At times he cries and at others he smiles at the absurd things that happen to those who wander through life without a goal. Chance gives him fleeting encounters with strangers. His only stable company is a certain melancholy, as light as an astronaut’s absence of gravity and a hope that ventures forth as subtle as a distant sound. At the end of these days, he realises that his life had collapsed a long time before and cannot be rebuilt. However, once his accounts are settled and his debts paid, a future lurks ahead for him too.

During his wanderings, Umbè walks the streets of the historic centre and, mostly, travels along the banks of Tiber river, the wide sidewalks that are visually both decadent and picturesque, with their narrow stairways and hidden corners. His trip through an unusually whitewashed piazza Navona is both evocative and bizarre: on board a scooter driven by a nun who traces (of course) the symbol of infinity between one fountain and another.