I live in a tiny village in the Ligurian hinterland, Frassineto in Valbrevenna (Ge) (Italy), where the people can be counted on one hand. A place with no bars, no shops, no distractions—only silence, forests, and a long wooden bench resting against an old stone wall that warms under the sun. That is where, as a child, I would sit every evening beside my grandfather. The sun-soaked wall became a kind of social hearth, a gathering place where the villagers met to talk, remember, and pass down their stories. Sitting beside them, I listened to a world made of real voices, unhurried rhythms and small details that today would be swallowed by the noise of modern life. Those evenings were my first film school: there, I learned how to listen, how to observe, and slowly, how to speak through stories. I’d bring an old record player to share music with the elders, or I’d talk about the little experiments, toys or contraptions I had built during the day. It was my first “set” unplanned, but profoundly authentic. Today I am a director and a member of the Italian Directors Association AIR3. I work across commercials, music videos and documentary films, but the core of my craft has never changed: shaping a story and transforming it into an emotional experience. Even the most minimal or seemingly neutral reality can become something magical when approached with care, humanity, and the belief that every story carries a breath, a memory, a feeling. In every project, I look for that spark capable of resonating with whoever is watching the same spark I felt as a child, listening to the elders speak at dusk. Those who choose to work with me aren’t just commissioning a piece of audiovisual content; they’re entrusting me with a fragment of their own story, asking me to turn it into emotion, truth and imagination. And every time, at the start of a new project, I return at least in spirit to that wooden bench beneath the warm wall, to remind myself where my way of making cinema truly began.