ELECTRIC CHAIR Guest Artistic Director

Huddled with Director of Photography Fabio Cianchetti and other members of his crew, Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci is watching digital texts and looking doubtful. Perhaps it’s better to go back to film. There are only a few days left before filming begins on ME AND YOU, and so film it is. Bertolucci arrives in an electric wheelchair, allowing him to move easily around the studio, which has been transformed into a basement. During the nine weeks spent on the set we are glued to the director – to his empathic way of communicating with his two young actors, to the long periods spent waiting in the dressing room in contrast to the frenzied activity that is all part of filmmaking. On the last day of shooting, Bertolucci asks the makeup artist to make him up as a woman because, he suggests, the more he’s dressed up, the more manly he looks. And this, too, sounds like a metaphor for his cinema in Monica Stambrini’s documentary.