“I started shooting it in the first days of the lockdown, I mounted it at night, together with my partner, and I learned the job of parenting even behind the camera lens”. Speaking is Nina Baratta, brilliant emerging director, who has been able to give an original and exciting look into the increasingly daily story of the consequences of Covid (here all the updates) on our lives. Above all, Nina is Maya’s mother, protagonist of the film that tells the long days of the first lockdown through the eyes of her daughter, keeping in perfect balance between the role of simple observer behind the lens and the maternal gestures, necessary to allow her little girl to face confinement in the most serene way possible.
“Maya’s quarantine” is therefore a film born and made only in the days of the lockdown, a film that flows inexorably, like the memories of those who watch it identifying themselves with common, yet unusual emotions, because they are those, unfiltered, of the eyes of a two-year-old girl, born from her words, sometimes enthusiastic, often lost and sad, words and gestures in which we recognize our children and the anxieties of adults sometimes unable to understand, explain and finally comfort. All with the background of other words, those of the then Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, who announced decrees, forced by the chilling numbers of deaths to lengthen the time of confinement. But also with the background of the smart working of Maya’s father, of infinite calls, in which we talk about layoffs, jobs that disappear, economic difficulties that still too many continue to face.
Maya asks her mother to go out because it is sunny outside and she does not understand why she can no longer cross the threshold of the house, with her she builds a fantastic blackboard of food film to paint, looks at the applause in her father’s arms from the balconies, listen to the voices of confined neighbors like her, count the few passers-by, imagine seeing pirate ships in the claustrophobia of the sea of palaces that surround it in the Centocelle district of Rome, fantasizing within increasingly narrow walls, in increasingly slower hours
Above all Maya is a lucky child. Around her, even in her moments of whims and despair, she imagines the patience and understanding of two parents capable of reinventing themselves without ever giving in to nervousness. A world, that of childhood and adolescence, which instead suffers the most dramatic side of the consequences of the lockdown, isolation, economic and social collapse due to the pandemic. In 2020 there were 1,260 girls and 1,117 boys who suffered violence in the family such as to require the intervention of the police. 13% more than in 2019, according to what emerges from the Indifesa dossier by Terre des Hommes.
To Nina Baratta, who with her film continues to travel through festivals, numerous awards received, and cinemas, which unfortunately are not those of large-scale distribution, and does so with the determination of those who have something really important to tell, we must say thanks for that too. Because it reminds us to protect our children from the Sars-Cov2 virus, and teaches us that it is important to listen to our children, looking for the tools to communicate with them. To enter a fantasy world, to which we would otherwise not have access.
Source-tg24.sky.it