VENICE – Opening the Giornate degli Autori 2025 is a story that made headlines because of its brutality, but was quickly forgotten, overshadowed by new and more scandalous atrocities that deserved to be brought to light. La Gioia by Nicolangelo Gelormini, the only Italian film in competition, is loosely based on a tragic news story: the murder of teacher Gloria Rosboch, in Castellammonte, a town of 10,000 in the province of Ivrea. She disappeared in 2016 and was later found dead, strangled by a former student, 22-year-old Gabriele Defilippi, with the complicity of her lover, a fifty-year-old hairdresser with a volatile personality.
La gioia, produced by HT Film, Indigo Film, and Vision Distribution in collaboration with SKY, is based on the play Se non sporca il mio pavimento by Gioia Salvatori and Giuliano Scarpinato, who also wrote the screenplay for the film (winner of the 2021 Premio Franco Solinas), with Benedetta Mori and in collaboration with Chiara Tripaldi and director Nicolangelo Gelormini.
The film offers a painful and poignant portrayal of the repressed Piedmontese province, where Valeria Golino plays a middle-aged teacher who lives with her elderly parents, suffocated and dreaming of an ideal love known only through books. In her dreams her name is Gioia, the title of the film: a transfiguration of reality that highlights the search for joy and tenderness even amidst the debris of an oppressive or amoral daily life.
Gioia's sincerity cannot accept the pettiness of the world, and her nineteenth-century idea of ??love ranges from the unreal and lofty heights of Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Baudelaire (The Flowers of Evil), Dumas (The Lady of the Camellias), through Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice), and Choderlos de Laclos (Dangerous Liaisons). She reads these extracts to her student, in a sort of reciprocal emotional education.
Alessio, played by Saul Nanni, is the brash student who knows only how to seduce and manipulate. Inevitably, his intrusion into her tranquil existence will lead to an irreversible collision. As the director explains, the relationship with Alessio is fuelled by moments of fullness and emptiness; it is in this imbalance that they mysteriously develop a connection, one that struggles to find words to express itself, to exist. Or at least this is what she hopes, almost as if together, Gioia and Alessio can give themselves the emotional educations they both lack.
Nicolangelo Gelormini: "Gioia and Alessio are characters created in an imaginary setting, as a cinematic invention, to give substance to the feeling of isolation that characterizes our present. They are encircled by petty figures who struggle desperately, embittered by life in a brutal province. The resulting feeling is one of terrible abandonment, of dark dissolution, a desire for annihilation that poisons existence. Gioia’s secular sacrifice, her tenaciously pure feelings at odds with the cynicism of the world, marks the definitive impossibility of redemption from evil for those who commit evil."
The cast includes Jasmine Trinca, as Alessio’s mother, and Francesco Colella, as the fifty-year-old lover who becomes an accomplice in the murder.
The story is set in the province and city of Turin, although the production spent only a few weeks in the Piedmont capital. Fregene and Rome stood in for Piedmont in many scenes.
"The locations where we filmed La Gioia are also a transfiguration of reality. La Gioia is not only an evocative title, it is also a way to transform reality," said the director.
Filming in Piedmont, in November 2024, was supported by the Film Commission Torino Piemonte and the contribution of the FESR Piemonte 2021-2027 - Bando Piemonte Film TV Fund. Urban settings in Turin included: Piazza IV Marzo, Piazza Vittorio Veneto and its storied café under the arcades, Caffè Elena and the former FIAT Lingotto factory. The director was particularly inspired by this last location: “I was very keen, right from the start, on filming at the Lingotto. It was a true passion of mine as an architect; it's a place rarely seen in film, and that really attracted me.”
The building now houses an art gallery; when location scouting, Gelormini came across Julius von Bismarck's work The Expressions of Thetis, a buoy suspended in space that floats at the centre of the iconic spiral ramp, which is seen at the end of the film where it takes on a highly symbolic role: “That buoy became Gioia,” he said. “It's something so very personal, but the moment I saw the work I understood that the concept of the film had found its form”.