The Loss World Monologues by Maria Howell courageously explores one of the most difficult and complex themes in human life: loss and the processing of pain.

A vast and disorienting territory, never addressed too much and easy to reduce to the "already said". Howell's merit is precisely that of avoiding this trap and doing it in the only possible way: the immediacy, the simplicity of the vision and the profound sincerity of the monologues presented. Five women, including the Author herself, lay bare the essence of their pain in front of the camera. Leaving them free to elaborate it, that is, literally, to let it be modified by the images of memory and by the translation that the word makes of the latter - a symbolic and conventional summary that can only try to render a limited part of a whole that is much more vast and elusive - the "writing" manages, miraculously, to never appear artificial, that is, mediated by easy structural filters, but profoundly sincere and foreign to gender manipulation. In short, The Loss World Monologues is a film that does not ask cinema to replace reality, but tries to do exactly the opposite: make reality the nucleus of cinematic discourse. The cinematographic construction, in fact, is itself not artificial. As in a psychotherapeutic dance, only the faces of the five protagonists express themselves, in a collage of close-ups that does not force them to stay in the times of cinema, to the rhythm of a pre-established narrative, but seems to want to wait for them, giving each one the time to elaborate, in fact, to re-modify one's inner world. And so, if we want to stick to what is strictly cinematic, we can imagine that the "edited" is a very small part of the "shot", that what we hear and see is there to evoke to us, by unconditional reflex, everything that has been discarded for editing needs, but which is present, like a vibration and an overflow of the image itself, like the path that led to the visible tip of the iceberg. Cinema, therefore, of pure evocation and real introspection. The women talk about, completely opening their shell, that cocoon in which they tried to hole up and from which they tried to mend the cracks, the territory of solitude and absence, the planet of memory and of the new presence of the other, husband or companion from whom we can now see new signals and symbols ready to emerge in a space that is being redefined. The strength of the close-ups, cells of an expressionist cinema of almost primitive origin (if we consider the face as a concentrated, immediate element, detached from an external reality that confuses and distracts), allows the Author on stage to even carry out a change of perspective, comparing two possible Selves: one who was able to give free rein to the pain, in the absence of children, the other who had to give himself completely to them, no longer having time for himself, but receiving in exchange the possibility of glimpse Him in the eyes of children. This change of perspective, which occupies the central part of the film, also represents its strongest moment, the one in which the "writing", perhaps unconsciously, also enjoys detaching itself from full respect for reality, amplifying the strings of the imagination , revealing, this time by contrast, how pain, the absolute protagonist, if treated with profound truth and freed even from the stories that represent it, is something real in itself, and no longer needs to be certified by a narrative that validates it. And so, naturally, without forcing, the film comes to touch on hope, which "is a reality and not a figure of speech". The light, which can come both from faith and from a completely internal development of absence, which ends up revealing itself as a new presence, of the other, of the surrounding world, and, above all, of oneself in the renewed space of that world.

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CHAMELEON FILM FESTIVAL