5 Questions with Marameo

1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?

I started as a graffiti artist, first painting then filming and photographing graffiti artists around me.

2) What was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?

Everything started with graffiti, the night, the city and the people. I used to spend long nights out around the city graffiting together with my crew. The more I got into it the more I realized It wasn’t really just graffiti, rather it was the locations and the people we chanced upon every time we were out. We were always meeting great characters in amazing settings and I got interested in documenting them.

The initial idea was far more focussed on graffiti because of my proximity to that world. Later into pre-production and into filming, the film evolved from a graffiti documentary into a nocturnal city symphony. As we got deeper into the process, the roots of my interest came to the fore and I realised rather than document a subculture within Bologna, I wanted to depict Bologna as I had experienced it, with multiple subcultures co-existing under the cover of night.

3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And generally what part of the creative process do you enjoy the most?

The biggest challenge was pre-production and being serious about making sure what I wanted to film was worth filming. What was it that I really wanted to film? It was about deconstructing surface interests like graffiti and uncovering something I was closer to. It was about being prepared, and being prepared for something unexpected. I knew Bologna, I knew my characters, but documentaries rely on the tension between knowing a world and capturing something you could never have planned. The hardest process was preparing, but once I felt ready, filming and editing came smoothly. As we began to shoot, we became involved in a universe. We uncovered hidden sides of the city that we began to live in. In graffiti that’s what you call freestyling. We started living in a world we were filming and ended up filming the world we were living. That was the part I enjoyed most, filming, and living through filming.

4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?

I recently watched Terra Di Mezzo (1996) by Italian director Matteo Garrone, also director of Dogman. I found the direction of the characters fantastic. He starts from real characters, he scripts them as for a fiction film and on set takes the film back to its documentary roots.

5) What’s next for you?

I see cinema as part of a wider medium – the audiovisual. What's next for me is to develop cinema into a less constructed and more immediate medium, both the making process and the distributive one. I think cinema is evolving slower than other current mediums and there is an urgent need and space for creative innovation.

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