Leonardo Di Costanzo, born on Ischia, began to work in the film industry in France toward the end of the ‘80s. In 2013, he won the David di Donatello for Best New Director for L’intervallo.
Regarding his film, the director said: “Almost everywhere we found a great willingness to talk, to open up. Sometimes the meetings would be attended by guards, managers and some of the inmates. And it proved easy to create a strange climate of conviviality, with people almost vying to tell their own stories. There was laughter too. Then, when the meeting was over, everyone resumed their roles and the men in uniform, keys in hand, took the others, the convicts, back to their cells. In the face of this drastic return to reality, we outsiders experienced a sense of disorientation. And it was this feeling that guided the making of the film: Ariaferma is not a film on the conditions in Italian prisons. It is perhaps a film on the absurdity of imprisonment.”