Antonio Marras, after decades of success as a designer, makes his film debut with the short film 'Motel Jacaranda', dedicated to the tormented love between Anna Maria Pierangeli and James Dean and previewed in Milan.
«Anna Maria Pierangeli - says the creative from Alghero, who had also dedicated a collection to the actress - was born in Sardinia to two middle-class parents from Cagliari . As a teenager she moved to Rome, where she was noticed by De Sica and arrived in the cinema. Because of her beauty she was called to Hollywood, where they renamed her Pier Angeli. In Italy she had always been looked at with perplexity because, while Loren and the others came from the suburbs, her being upper-middle-class did not help her, but when she arrived in Hollywood she worked with everyone and fell in love, reciprocated, with James Dean. Her mother, however, was not happy with this union and opposed a love that remained such for life, even if she married someone else while he - legend has it - waited for her outside the church on a motorbike».
For his first short, the Sardinian designer imagined that the two lovers "took refuge in a hotel that I thought of as a place crowded with clandestine love affairs, with different stories set in different rooms. They are all tormented loves that are destined to end, that involve a pain in moving away as happens to them, with her saying goodbye and him calling her again, but it is clear - he explains - that they will never see each other again".
The famous actress is played by the former model Simonetta Gianfelici, and the story is further enhanced by Marras' clothes, "which are - he concludes - an integral part of the story, fused and mixed with the stories and their dreamlike language". After this first test, Marras hopes to soon be able to make a feature film: "My references are Visconti, Pasolini, Fellini, Herzog, Bergman, I am attracted - he says - by independent films, by visions that shake you and provoke emotions inside you and this is what I would like to do". In the meantime, "with this short film I am realizing a dream that I have always had inside, that of telling stories by intertwining images, sounds and clothes as if they were words of an emotional script".
