Andrea Vigoni is an Italian filmmaker based in London. After completing a BA in Media Studies at the University of Milan, he moved to the UK to attend the London Film School, where he graduated as a production designer. Recently, he has been working in the art department on feature films and TV productions and designing several short films across Europe and Asia.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your background in filmmaking? What inspired you to pursue a career in the film industry?
When I was a kid, I remember watching the extra contents on DVDs often showing the making of and behind the scenes of films, and I loved to see how everything was actually a choreographed illusion and fabricated reality. I also wanted to be an architect, at least at some point. My film background was fairly academic, my passion for films started while studying film history and film analysis first in High School and then during my BA in Media Studies in university. It was only later when I went to the London Film School, that I was properly introduced to the world of Production Design and the Art Dept. I suddenly understood that building that illusion was an actual job and a very complex one. What I loved as a kid all began making sense and I have now pursued a career in the Art Dept since my first jobs in the industry. I am extremely fascinated by the world building aspect of the design work, how it can be used to define the rules of a story and to organize and interpret our reality.
What does being part of Berlinale Talents mean to you? Is there something about the city that resonates with your creative process?
I believe Berlinale Talents could be a fantastic platform for meeting new filmmakers and voices not only from Europe but from all over the world. I hope that meeting different people will mean discovering new ways of thinking and working, challenging my methods and pushing me to try different ones. I attended the festival in Berlin before and the thing that struck me most was how the film selection and programme was full of bold stories and themes, focusing on social and political issues requiring each person in the audience to self-reflect and question their positions and actions in the world.
How do you balance expressing your unique voice while creating work that resonates with audiences around the world?
Filmmaking is art, and industry, and also a team process involving hundreds of people. By its own nature, it often can be very hard to balance one's personal vision and sometimes you are not able to choose. Personally, I think that in my role as designer the best path to express my own voice is by choosing wherever possible projects and stories that resonate with me and my beliefs. By sharing the vision of the directors and the other creatives trying to bring these stories to a broader audience, that very vision becomes mine too. Then, my goal is to serve it and enrich it through my design work, by bringing in my personal experiences, cultural background and knowledge and creating additional layers of visuals and meanings.
This year’s theme is 'Listen Courageously – Cinematic Narratives in Times of Dissonance.' How does the theme connect to your work and the stories you want to tell?
Films can be a very powerful way to explore and discuss the world around us. I really like when my work makes me discover something new, or even more when it requires me to question what I know or my position about something. It's easy to avoid things that we don't like or that we'd rather not think about, but it is imperative not to lock ourselves in a distorted bubble that suits our vision of the world. I particularly love projects that try to explore forms of oppression and control, both outspoken and blatant such is the case of stories set within dictatorships, but also more subtle ones dealing with cultural and systemic dynamics of alienation. I think this is what the theme of 'listen courageously' is calling for, asking us to listen to people whose stories are being ignored or silenced. But it is even asking us to listen to people promoting ideas and actions which we disagree with or totally dislike, because avoiding confronting them is the first step to enable them.