In soccer, sometimes your team wins. And sometimes it loses. And sometimes that loss is actually a win. This is the story of Bari's 2013-2014 campaign told in Mario Bucci's film, A Wonderful Season of Failure. The director spoke about the end of an era, getting a fresh start, and improvising a film on the fly.
A Wonderful Season of Failure screens at Kicking + Screening on opening night, June 23. BUY TICKETS
What drew you to the story of Bari and its rabid supporters?
Why Bari? Firstly, because is the city where we all grew up and we knew all its dynamics inside-out. Then history made it become the center of a long chaos which lasted five years. We could not avoid telling that story.
The film has a beautiful title (Una meravigliosa stagione fallimentare in Italian). How did you come up with it?
I loved the title from the start. Our producer, Ivan d’Ambrosio, came up with it. He was not wrong about it. I must say that also the other two titles of the trilogy are inspired and fitting. We wanted to give this film another title to follow the lyrics of a nursery rhyme all the three works have in common, but this title was perfect... the former, temporary one, however, it’s hidden in the poster... hard to find.
Did the filming play out how you expected when you started?
We knew it was something unique was going on, but as producers and filmmakers – and especially as fans of the team – we wanted to clinch promotion and come back in Serie A. The defeat has only given more importance to the work we were doing.
What is the most difficult aspect of making a film like this?
The hardest thing is managing times and moods of real people, especially players whose image is often bound. This football club has been so willing and open and even the players were very happy to write this story with us. It is not just a coincidence that one of the voices in the movie is the captain’s one, Marino Defendi, who accepted – once we decided to write the monologue – to narrate the filming of his arrival at the airport after the semifinal. Lastly, it is hard to work when you have to improvise almost all the time. (How do you know before a decisive match if it will end 0-1 or 4-1?).
Is it hard to spend so much time with a group of people and stay objective in your filmmaking?
The most involved with the players was Marco Gernone, the filmmaker who has been beside me in this work, who also followed the team’s away games. I watched the events of the team closely, and I’ve always tried to connect them with the city, their moods, their needs, their dreams. From this point of view, I have always kept the same attitude as a director. The movie language adopted instead was decided immediately, on the first day of filming. We would have told the story from inside the stadium through the players, but playing with cinema at the same time (the man who presents at the beginning, for example, is a tribute to the ironic ending titles of the TV series The Kingdom by Lars von Trier).