Although QUEERGURU is sort of obsessed with queer cinema and there is nothing we like better than doing ‘our bit’ to help it reach the audience around the globe it so deserves . It is however not usually in our manifest to start discussing them before a single scene has been shot …. but hey rules like this are made to be broken.
So when one of our favorite queer film distributors told us he was swapping his ‘hat’ for that of producer, we were only to happy to share the news of his new project.
ERION will be the third short film from Romanian Marius Gabriel Stancu and is a summer love story between two boys belonging to completely different worlds: Christian, a university student who lives in the north of the Country but who spends his holidays to his parents’ hometown, and Erion, a son of Albanian immigrants. Although the two boys spend the whole summer together, the end of it will also mark the end of a relationship that is impossible to cultivate because of the different choices they will decide to do.
“Erion” investigates the desires and the dreams for the future of two guys who are no longer teenagers, at the time of challenging social and political changes that have affected the Southern Italian territory and above all in the Apulia region, and which have led, also in many European places, to the foundations of a new societies made of coexistence and integration, but also of strong contrasts between different peoples, cultures and identities.
When Queerguru caught up with the filmmaker he told us. “Erion” is not just a love story. I have always questioned what is the limit between personal freedom and social and cultural conventions; between what we are and what we somehow belong to and what we believe in: a question that perhaps will never be answered, or at least not in an absolute and valid way. From here, however, and also from personal experiences, my investigation and my questions about feelings start. I was born in a small town close to the Capital and I stayed there until I was 17 years old. I grew up surrounded by different types of people and backgrounds. With my teenage eyes, that was a beautiful but strange place, and only after some time I did realise all the contradictions and the sense of marginalisation it contained. The aspect that undoubtedly struck me most was linked to the life of minority communities: families who lived with their own rules and “traditions” in the neighbouring areas of our small town and in a totally different way compared to “our” lives, to they way people lived in the Capital. In those contexts that I felt so distant from me, but which I looked at with a lot of curiosity, children were born with a sealed fate; a destiny made of arranged marriages and, in the case of girls, of abandonment into the hands of other families already at the age of ten or twelve. Girls and boys soon found themselves next to other people they didn’t know, without any right to be able to decide, without being able to make choices of any kind, including those concerning gender and sexuality and, of course, love. In hearing these stories told, if I myself felt anger and frustration, I didn’t imagine and I wondered what their feelings were. “Erion” tries to tell all of this too.
Erionn stars Giovanna Rito, Gianni Filannino, Francesco Casulli and Leonardo Resta. and is being filmed in the Apulia region, South-East of Italy. However somehow when the producer Cosimo Santoro (The Open Reel) wrote to us to promote hos new project he forget to attach our airli ne ticket. And we hear Italy is so wonderful at this time of year
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