SLOW
DIRECTED BY GIOVANNI BOSCOLO, DANIELE NOZZI
ITALY // 2020
11 MINS
Since Marisa retired, her life has changed profoundly: she feels useless, abandoned, without a purpose. The meeting with a secret organization of pensioners reveals to her one of the greatest mysteries in the history of mankind: road traffic.
Reflective Encounters
“As with almost anything else in life, growing old comes with its own set of boorish clichés. If you believe them then – as soon as you’re ready to get your free bus pass - you’ll also receive a volume button for your TV (so you can turn it to the setting ‘Louder than a bomb hitting a cymbal factory’), a list of conversation topics which includes ‘The relative youth of Policemen nowadays’ and a special pill that makes it impossible to figure out how to work any new technology.
What makes Slow so fun is that it gleefully skewers one of these clichés – namely the one that says elderly people drive at a pace that would make a tortoise go “Speed up a bit!” – in a way that both refutes it yet also admits that it may contain the odd hint of truth.
While directors Giovanni Boscolo and Daniele Nozzi make sure that silliness is the order of the day here – and do a fine job of keeping their comedic conceit going throughout – this also has an underlying sense of pathos as the film serves as a reminder not to forget about the older generation. Because, if you do, you’ll be finding yourself in that traffic jam for a lot longer than you’d like…”
— Laurence Boyce
Director's Statement
The project was born to explore a new reading key to tell a serious topic: the elderly loneliness. In every family there is at least one elderly person that lives his/her life at a reduced speed, cut off from the frenzy and speed of life of all days of the youngest.
It is here that the creative idea of the creators comes to life and it is here that the title of short film: "Slow". Through the comedy the "real" origin of one of the plagues of our city society is told modern, traffic.
How much time do we waste in our lives stuck in traffic? How many times there we wondered why until a moment before the road was completely free, and now suddenly blocked? How many times in the car did we feel alone despite being in the midst of many other cars and we have phoned someone?
Filmmaker Bio
Giovanni Boscolo is an author and filmmaker. He graduated in Disciplines of Art, Music and Entertainment at the University of Padua. He has a Master’s degree in writing for cinema and TV at the Cattolica University in Milan.
He worked as a production assistant in the films "Io sono Li", "Only you" and in the TV series "Faccia d’angelo". He makes promotional, institutional and small video commercials on behalf of several agencies. Daniele Nozzi, after starting with VFX, compositing and video-making in general, specialized as an editor for a small communication agency in Rome.
He works for several clients, including Hera, Eataly, Acea, Safilo, Campus Bio-Medico of Rome, Disney and Novartis. After working on various independent short films, he decides to try for himself and make his first short film as a co-writer and co-director.