Filmmaking

Il Felicitometro ("The Happiness Meter")

No-budget film · in progress · artificial intelligence and non-professional actors · in Italian

This is the film I'm shooting right now: a no-budget film that mixes artificial intelligence and non-professional actors.

It is set in a world where skill has become optional: anyone can consult expert machines on any subject for the price of a monthly subscription. So someone, starting from scratch, invents the Felicitometro, a small pocket gadget that measures happiness.

Will it work? Just in case, consumer society adopts it as the craze of the summer. Everyone tries it, it becomes a media sensation, and the slogan of people interviewed in the street turns into a meme: "The Felicitometro? It isn't true, but I believe it."

The story

The inventor, the eccentric Elio Mascheri, is the man of the moment: his TV debates with every kind of expert turn into a huge advert for the product. Science pushes back, and Professor Nivenini, a sceptical scientist, becomes the face of the resistance to the gadget.

Meanwhile the Felicitometro changes lives and relationships: a couple quarrels and makes up, the No meters organise a revolt against technological control, and three celebrities agree to put their happiness to the test in a reality show, the Happy Challenge. All the way to a TV showdown that promises to decide the gadget's future.

But in the meantime people measure their happiness and find they are happier than they thought. And that makes them even happier. Is a gadget enough to make us happy? Just in case, I'm trying it too.

From the set

Assioma 5 – Opposti e paralleli ("Axiom 5 – Opposites and Parallels")

Medium-length film, 45 minutes · 2005 · Accademia Olympia, Mestre · in Italian

The story

The film tells the fictionalised stories of Einstein and Euclid who, two thousand years apart, clash and meet over the same problem: parallel lines.

Einstein, in early twentieth-century Switzerland, tries to escape the scientific outlook of his time by exploring mysticism and philosophy with a band of merry students. One day he has a vision: all the matter in the universe is simply "dense" energy.

Euclid, in a Magna Graecia steeped in mysticism, establishes his ideas by gathering the rules of geometry: a wonderful scaffold of rationality that, he discovers, rests on unproven foundations, the axioms.

Einstein will prove his visions once he takes a scientific approach and questions geometry from its very origins, showing that Euclid's fifth axiom, by which two parallel lines can never meet, is false.

The full film

Watch the video: Assioma 5 – Opposti e paralleli (2005), full film

How it was made

We finished it in 2005 with Accademia Olympia, an open group that worked by consensus: every choice approved unanimously. The group: Adolfo Zilli, Andrea Pegoraro, Damiano Cecchelin, Elisa Cargnel, Michele Doro, Massimiliano De Lazzari.

• 13 May 2005: preview at the Videoteca di Mestre, Centro Culturale Candiani.
• 5 September 2005: screening at the Venice Film Meeting, Multisala Astra on the Lido, during the 62nd Venice Film Festival.

The ABCveneto article on the preview (in Italian): Mestre: anteprima gratuita del film Assioma 5 – Opposti e paralleli.

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