SIGNORI PROFESSORI

Young college graduate Lisa Bentini gets her first job as a substitute
teacher at a middle school in Bologna. In Naples, professor Silvana
De Fazio prepares her last class for their final examinations before
she retires. Professor Dario Tulipano, a pro-tempore teacher from
Palermo, moves to Bolzano for a one-year substitute teaching job.
Three different experiences that illustrate the world of schools from
the professors’ point of view: expectations and satisfactions, vocations
and frustrations, passion and confusion.

“I wanted to show the solitude of teaching positions, the enthusiasm
and its waning, the sacrifices that temporary jobs entail, a Kafkaesque
bureaucracy and the moral responsibility of a job that is commonly
viewed as schizophrenically oscillating between an old-fashioned,
romantic image and a present-day, undignified loss of social prestige.
I observed the characters close up to create a sense of intimacy
and I preferred illustrating their thoughts and emotions through facts,
gestures, looks, tones of voice and silences, in order to study reality
through a language that is similar to fiction films.”