But the Fury of Our Gazes

In 2000 I was thirty years old and living in Bologna. Not the polished and postcard-like Bologna of today, but a rougher, more lateral city, crossed by an irregular energy, where one could still make poetry without asking for permission and cinema without asking for forgiveness. I was a poet and a film editor, two professions that at the time didn’t seem contradictory: both had to do with rhythm, with cutting, with what remains when you remove the superfluous.

In those years, the Theater of the Warrior adopted me artistically, as happens only in certain places and at certain historical moments: not with contracts or promises, but with trust, space, and listening. I reciprocated as one does when you have little else to give but yourself, pouring myself completely into a film that was not just a project, but an act of poetry and love.

That film was But the Fury of Our Gazes, directed by Loredana Alberti. A work born before 2002, long before its release in theaters, because real films always begin before the audience encounters them. They start in cold hallways, in long nights, in decisions made without a safety net. Working on that film meant going through a historical period in which making independent cinema was an exercise in physical and moral resistance. There were no digital shortcuts, no platforms to absorb the risk, no illusion that it was enough to “create content.” There was work, time, effort, and a vision that had to be kept alive day after day, like keeping a fire burning when the wind shifts.

I was not just the editor. I was, out of necessity more than ambition, a sort of silent deus ex machina of the production: the one who solves, connects, repairs, holds together. Because films, especially those born outside of large structures, are not made only with talent, but with a quantity of human energy that is hard to even name today. Making a film, then, meant putting your body into the project, accepting that the work would pass through you and consume you a bit. There was no clear distinction between life and work, between poetry and technique: editing was writing, writing was editing.

The trailer that remains today is not just a promotional fragment. It is a trace of that time, of that Bologna, of that age of life when thirty years were not a threshold but a combustion. Watching it means returning to a place where art was not a strategy, but a necessity. Where films were made not because it was “convenient,” but because not making them would have been a betrayal.

This is what that work still represents for me: not a title in a filmography, but proof that, for a period, it was possible to hold together vision, effort, and love without separating them into watertight compartments. And that sometimes, even if the world changes and cities transform, that fury in the gazes remains like an internal line, a measure, a way of being in things that does not fade.