THE BLUE FARAWAY

Short Talk with Sofia Spotti (director)

BEST SHORT STUDENT FICTION FILM Category

22nd IN THE PALACE International Short Film Festival 2025

United Kingdom, Fiction, English, 00:09:19

Synopsis: When an isolated man discovers his beloved dog is dying, he is confronted by long- buried childhood memories of life on the sea with his father.

Biography: Sofia Spotti is an Italian director currently studying an MA at the National Film and Television School. Her interests vary in many subjects with a specific attention on human behaviour and psychology. Her style is influenced by the Italian magic realism directors and her films try to investigate the relationship between reality and surrealism through a dreamy point of view. Her previous work was screened in different international film festivals such as Festa del Cinema di Roma.

Sofia Spotti, director

Toma Manov: In your film, we are introduced to a protagonist who loses someone very close to them, a dog. Can your film be seen as a parallel between life and death, that even though they are opposites, they’re somehow interconnected?

Sofia Spotti: The death of the dog is what triggers the fact that he starts spiraling down into these memories of his dad, who obviously died when he was a child. So the two things are connected. It’s kind of like a little bit the idea of this repressed trauma, that when you experience something similar later in your adult life, it triggers something you might have repressed earlier in childhood. If that makes sense.

Toma Manov: Why did you choose the sea as both a visual and audio motif to tell your story?

Sofia Spotti: So the story actually takes inspiration from a photograph I saw at a museum. It was a kid in a boat, and the title of the photo was “The first time I went back into the sea after my father died.” It’s a black-and-white photo, and for some reason, it just stuck with me. So I tried to come up with a story based on that photograph. The sea was always there from the beginning, I had this feeling of wanting it to be almost like a character in the film itself. But we had some limitations. We couldn’t really go to the seaside, because it was a student film, and we could only shoot within an hour’s travel from school. So I found this lagoon where we shot and tried to make it look like the seaside—but it actually wasn’t.

Toma Manov: When you saw that photo and it stuck with you, did you try to do any research on it, or was it unavailable and you just built the story from your imagination?

Sofia Spotti: I’m kind of a very visual person, so I always get ideas from something I see that sticks with me. I didn’t look that much into it. I kind of didn’t know what it meant. For me, my dad is still alive, luckily, but this film is about how he expresses love to me. Not by saying “I love you,” but by telling me stories about mythological creatures. So I didn’t really understand at the beginning what the story was about, but while I was writing it, or developing it with the writer, Angus, I realized that’s what it was about: how you express emotions you can’t say with words, through other means.

Toma Manov: Was it your choice to bring in a writer? 

Sofia Spotti: Yeah, I mean, we pretty much developed it together from the start. Then he wrote a draft, and I did some director’s passes on that. But it was a collaboration from the beginning.

Toma Manov: You also mentioned drawing inspiration from stories your dad used to tell you as a way of expressing love. If it’s not too personal, are any of those stories subtly incorporated into the plot?

Sofia Spotti: I mean, my dad is very passionate about history, and he always used to tell me stories about Greek gods and whatnot. He used to make up stories with my puppets when I was a child. He never really said, “I love you,” but I know he does, because that’s how he shows it. So it’s not necessarily that this specific story is from him, but the influence is there. The mythological creature, Glaucus, is a god of the sea. And we kind of made up this little thing about the seaweed, but that’s also rooted in mythology.

 
Interviewer: Toma Manov

Editor: Martin Kudlac