If I don't come back tomorrow, director Paola Randi: "Tell about the absence, not the murderer"

In If tomorrow I don't come back, Paola Randi chooses to tell the story of Giulia Cecchettin through everyday life and the gaze of her family.

The film, directed by the director and written together with Lisa Nur Sultan, is inspired by the book Cara Giulia, written by Gino Cecchettin with Marco Franzoso, and arrived in theaters on November 5, distributed by Notorious Pictures.

"In Gino's book the murderer is never named and on this point we were perfectly in agreement": thus Paola Randi, during the press conference to present the film at the Rome Film Festival, clarified that the choice not to give space to whoever killed Giulia was shared from the beginning.

"This film tells the story of the absence of Giulia and her family, the path that her loved ones took to be able to transform such great private pain into civil commitment. This was, first and foremost, what we were interested in telling."

At the center there is therefore not the figure of the culprit, nor the attempt to reconstruct the crime, but what remains after the loss: a family called to find a way to live with an absence and, at the same time, to transform their experience into a public battle.

"Responsibility does not only concern the guilty"

The director's reflection then broadens to the collective meaning of Giulia's story and the need not to consider violence against women as a problem that concerns only those who commit it.

"The moment we identify a culprit, we somehow lift up everyone else: he is the culprit, what have I got to do with it? But no. There is something common that we must take care of and take responsibility for."

Randi recognizes in Gino's commitment and Elena Cecchettin's lucidity an important step for the public debate: the possibility of calling the problem by its name and overcoming a representation of violence as an unpredictable gesture of exceptional individuals, isolated and far from everyday life.

Beyond the guilty party, there is collective responsibility

"For a long time, feminicides were told as if we were inside a detective story, as if they were committed by mysterious, maniac, evil, crazy individuals coming from who knows where", observes Paola Randi.

The reality, he underlines, is much closer and therefore even more difficult to recognise: "Those who kill women are very often those who should love them, that is, their partners, their husbands. They are the people around us".

It is here that the film finds one of its most profound reasons: to remove Giulia's story from the dimension of the news story and bring it back into a reflection that involves everyone.

It is not enough to identify and condemn a perpetrator: we need to question the culture, behaviors and relational dynamics that make violence possible.

For Randi, remembering Giulia also means not delegating this responsibility to others.