An appreciation for food and wine, life and leisure … and a feature in Italian Vogue — just some of the things Chelsea McMullan has managed to acquire during her first six months at Fabrica.
Since February, the young Langley filmmaker has been hard at work inside Benneton’s artistic institute near Venice, Italy — an opportunity she’d dreamed about since first reading about the centre in a Colors magazine when she was 15.
Living in Trevino, the 40-minute bicycle ride through the northern Italian countryside, to and from Fabrica each day, is the best part of the 26-year-old’s day, she said during a recent trip home to Canada.
So far, each day of her year-long sojourn to Italy has given the young woman food for thought. But for creative thrills, it’s tough to imagine stumbling upon a more intriguing tale than the one she found while helping to shoot a Benneton commercial.
Part of the reason for McMullan’s journey home earlier this fall, was the opportunity to screen her latest short film, Derailments, at the Toronto and Vancouver International Film Festivals.
Deragliamenti as it is called in Italian, McMullan’s short film about the movie Frederico Fellini never made and its connection to one of Italy’s most famed illustrators, came together through a series of fortunate coincidences, helped out by the young director’s keen instinct for a good story.
Her finished product, an 11-minute meditative documentary, is based on Fellini’s Il Viaggio di Mastorna detto Fernet about a man’s journey into the hereafter. Originally written as a feature film, the project was abandoned by the famed Italian director immediately before filming began — possibly because it brought him face to face with his own mortality in a way he could not endure.
But at 72, Fellini decided to revisit the film which he said had insinuated itself into everything else that he did as an artist.
Thus began his collaboration with his longtime friend Milo Manara, who took Fellini’s vision and began to draw it as a comic book.
Working on the Benneton ad in Verona, McMullan overheard people talking about the artist.
“I was intrigued, so I Googled him and I came upon this story,” she said. Through her research, she discovered that Manara and Fellini had been friends and collaborators, who sat and sketched out ideas on napkins over pasta and red wine.
A huge Fellini fan since childhood, McMullan was excited to find a connection between the artist and the director, and began to dig deeper.
Fellini died in 1993, but Manara — best known for drawing soft-core images of scantily clad women — now 66, lived nearby, and so she pitched her idea to Ries Straver, the head of the cinema department at Fabrica. Normally, arranging such a sit down would be easier said than done.
“Manara is pretty much one of the most important illustrators in the world. In Italy, he’s a god,” said McMullan.
Thanks to her association with Fabrica the young director was able to set up a brief, 20-minute interview with Manara. But the strict time limit meant she’d have to adjust her approach.
“Usually, I conceptualize the whole film first and then start shooting. This time, I asked the questions first,” she explained.
The interview was conducted entirely in Italian with the help of a translator, and though the artist gave thorough answers to each of her questions, when McMullan left, she really had no idea whether she had any of the material she needed for a film.
“I had a good feeling — based on his facial expressions and gestures,” she said.
Returning to Google — this time to translate the conversation — McMullan realized that her subject had given her exactly what he knew she needed.
She formally pitched the project and asked for the money to make it happen.
“I wanted to do it on film, which is more expensive (than digital),” she explained.
The director’s idea was to have the film look “as though the footage had been lost for 50 years and found in a janitor’s closet or in an insane asylum.
“I wanted it to be gritty, not to be precious with it. That can only be captured on film,” she said.
Still photos of Manara, his drawings and moving footage are combined in an attempt to draw a visual parallel between the illustrations and what Fellini was trying to do, while adding the director’s own voice to the film, McMullan explained of her vision.
She flew to Germany and shot scenes in front of a Cologne cathedral which features heavily in Fellini’s story, and in Berlin, where she was able to use sets still up from the earlier filming of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.
Both the approach and the subject matter were so unusual, Derailments became the subject of a story in Vogue Italia, after the editor of the magazine — a huge fan of Manara — got word of what McMullan was doing.
The short article was a huge step forward for the director.
“Vogue has that caché,” said McMullan. “It legitimized me in a lot of people’s eyes.
“You can talk about film festivals all you want, but Vogue.”
Although she has another few months to go in her year at Fabrica, McMullan is already noticing a boost from the association. “Since Fabrica, things have picked up exponentially,” she said.
At TIFF, she was selected by Telefilm as one of five filmmakers to watch, while xcreeners of Derailments have been requested by film fest organizers in Hong Kong and France (Clermont-Ferrand).
