In March of 2020, photographer and filmmaker Fabrizio Maltese returned to his family home in Italy from his current one in Luxembourg after his father Maurizio had a heart attack. As the country went into lockdown, a son attempted to support his mother while, unable to visit the hospital, they awaited the outcome of potentially life-threatening surgery. Tragically, although the surgery was a success, shortly after the family was reunited Covid-19 struck the house and the director’s mother passed away. In an attempt to comprehend and capture the mourning process, Maltese switched on his camera. The resulting film, Lost Flowers (I fiori persi), which premiered at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, is an intimate look at shared grief that quietly builds into a deeply affecting portrayal of familial love.
The film opens with a 10-minute prologue that is stylistically distinct from the rest of its 72-minute runtime. It weaves together time-lapse footage, intricately arranged still life photographs, what appear to be clips from old home movies, and a fragmentary, poetic voice-over to provide the context outlined in the above paragraph: of Maurizio’s hospitalisation, Fabrizio’s return to Italy, and the ensuing loss. What follows this is a more direct, observational documentary, depicting the subsequent days and weeks in the family home. In one sense, the prologue and body of the film feel like two separate entities, but in juxtaposing their different aesthetics, Maltese is able to intensify the effect of both.
What comes before the title card feels like it is more artistic in the traditional sense. Maltese’s skill as a photographer means that while we hear the background story, we see some sublime images – the play of light on the petals of a flower, for instance – and as he recounts the last hug he ever gave to his mother, the screen is filled with grainy home video footage that nostalgically evokes the past. This is brought to an abrupt end when the core of the film begins, and we are jolted into an immediate present by handheld footage accompanied only by natural sound. That is not to say that the images are any less considered, and a shot early on of an empty chair is particularly powerful as a representation of the absence that now fills the house, but they crucially feel less artificial. The footage was originally shot by Maltese for private record, rather than with a view to making a film, so there was no intent for future exhibition behind how the images were composed but contrasting them with the prologue heightens their immediacy and everyday truth.
Of course, the depiction of such a raw emotion as grief needs little in the way of amplification to allow audiences to connect with it and empathise with those on screen. Viewers are likely to find points of reference from their own lives in the myriad ways that reflection and remembrance manifest themselves, whether it is in finding meaning in the sorting through old clothes and photographs, or talking about – or struggling to talk about – those we have lost, or just the silence of a room that used to be so filled with life. The scene following the discovery of an old post-it note, in which Fabrizio feels compelled to emerge from behind the camera to comfort his father, is particularly heart-breaking and will be familiar to many.
This scene also has one of the several explicit references to the global pandemic that occur throughout the film and add another layer of complexity to its exploration of loss and the loneliness of sorrow. Fabrizio places a hand on his father’s shoulder and Maurizio asks, ‘when are we going to hug again?’ It recalls the memory in the prologue of the final hug given by Fabrizio to his mother and the ways in which our usual channels of comfort have been curbed in the past couple of years. It gives Lost Flowers a universal contemporary anchor, even as it meditates on grief as a timeless facet of the human condition.
Director, cinematography: Fabrizio Maltese
Producers, screenplay: Fabrizio Maltese, Stephan Roelants
Editor: Qutaiba Barhamji
Music: Emre Sevindik
Sound: Manuel Vidal
Production companies: Joli Rideau Media, Mélusine Productions (Luxembourg)
In Italian
72 minutes
