We interviewed Children’s Hearts at Night short movie’s director Carlotta Piccinini and actor Tomas Kutinjač, a Sayonara Film distribution that premiered at 2022 End of Days Film Festival in USA and was recently selected by 2022 Bideodromo Internacional Experimental Film and Video Festival in Bilbao, together with 2022 Aaretaler Kurzfilmtage in Switzerland. The authors recounted the short film production that took place in Germany during the pandemic and the introspective genesis of this project, carrying ample and complex sensitivities.

Children’s Hearts at Night project was born in Berlin in 2019 from an encounter between actor Tomas Kutinjač and screenwriter Nele Creydt, who wrote him a monologue turned out to be a profound text, rich of an effective musicality both in German and English language, and premonitory of the coming times that required a collective introspection and a reconsideration of the fundamental elements belonging to life and to the relationship with the self and the others. Kutinjač pushed the project to a creation in cinematographic form, involving director Carlotta Piccinini with whom he shares an artistic and human relationship made of vision and inspiration. The film was shot during the pandemic and this has also to do with the director’s idea behind this work: when Kutinjač presented Piccinini the text, she immediately felt between the words the empathic existence of a duality the character was living, a constant struggle between the inside and the outside, belonging to the historic moment that was in progress. The movie, according to the director, tells about a soul caged in itself, physically blocked in a place it can’t escape from, and develops following a continuous dialectic that eventually finds a resolving synthesis in dream and escape. Piccinini talks about it as a spontaneous work where she saw the prodromes of the expressive freedom she looks for in all of her creations, and she immediately embraced it both because of a research affinity with the discussed subjects of human identities and internal conflicts, and because she was intrigued by the ways and times of production in which the project was realised.

The actor, director and a set assistant, forced to shot the film during the first months of lockdown with a super low budget, went to an empty and abandoned place where they couldn’t contact other people, an old military station near Jüterbog, one hour away from Berlin city centre. The area, not entirely included in the movie, is actually a military small town – first Nazi then communist –, which brings back to a Berlin border imaginary of division between East and West that echoes in some contemporary dynamics. Berlin coexists on an architectural and urban level with the remains of this conflict and its long and destructive division, and it can still be perceived in many cultural activities of the areas around the city, characterized by an identity dialectic.

Kutinjač’s film career begins in 2017 when after years in the theatre field between Italy and Croatia he gets an acting role as a German soldier in a war movie, before moving to Berlin in 2019 and actively starting his film career in shorts, features and television commercials. This short movie is for the actor as a symbolic small picture of his passage from theatre to cinema acting, which can bring to a condition of solitude in everyday life and in freelancing when one’s found searching through themselves in a profound and significant way.

Piccinini arrives at filmmaking in a very instinctive way, without an actual education in the field, and starts working in indipendent productions and particularly in documentary dealing with the subjects of minority rights and especially women’s rights, a topic she’s still developing (her current production of a series of short documentaries is about young women’s unknown but incredible stories). At the moment, she’s also working on her first feature fiction whose subject is fragility and escape from contemporary society, that also relates to the way she decided to direct Children’s Hearts at Night. Piccinini tells about how fundamental it is for her, both on a personal and a working level, to experience listening to others as an instrument in the creative process in order to modify one’s own point of view, and how this project reminded her, through passion, vision and community spirit, of the reasons why she started making films in the first place.