The Bolognese director has entrusted to the CAM Sugar Journal a letter on the day Riz Ortolani would have turned 100. An intimate and moving tribute, which tells about a friendship that went beyond the bond in the editing room and which saw Avati and Ortolani collaborate on many seminal films, such as Festa di laurea, Zeder, Gita scolastica, Ultimo minuto, among others.

Dear Riz,

I feel a certain unease in writing to you, as I never truly did so throughout the many years of our partnership. And yet, our communication was rich, profound, never banal — centred on the great questions that creativity helps us confront. Everything would begin with the film we were working on, only to expand beyond it, into that realm where true friends confide in one another their defeats, reaching a level of intimacy that one never attains again with anyone else.

That is how it was with you, over countless afternoons in the editing room, or seated at the keyboard of your piano. Ours was, in essence, a musical friendship: we would invoke a composer — your knowledge of the classical world was boundless — to identify, as a kind of paradigm, a moment within an overture, an adagio, or any passage in which that composer had fully revealed the originality of their voice.

When I was shooting Storia di ragazzi e di ragazze, I suggested you draw inspiration from Alban Berg — and it delighted you. Just as I did with Parsifal by Richard Wagner for L’amico d’infanzia, or with the horns of Symphony No. 7 by Anton Bruckner for Una gita scolastica.

The morning I heard the news, I felt an overwhelming urge to run to you.
I drove recklessly fast along those kilometres that, leaving the outskirts of Rome, lead onto the Aurelia. What was the point of such haste, when all that awaited was the end of a relationship with no hope of continuation?

It would be the last of the countless journeys I had made to reach you at your splendid villa in Tarquinia, where I would find you seated at the piano, your hands trembling with tension. You were a composer who had won everything, both in Europe and across the Atlantic, and yet you awaited my judgement on the main theme of the film we were working on with the trepidation of a beginner, of someone uncertain.

I have long known that what I value most in people is precisely that uncertainty. And you were always in need of reassurance, of knowing that you had truly grasped the essence of our work.

On that accursed morning, you were not waiting for me at the piano, but lying among flowers inside a coffin. Only your Katyna stood beside you, at the centre of that vast room. She tried to smile at me, to show me how she was bearing the immense injustice she was enduring.

In the thirty years we spent working together, once we had found the theme that convinced us, you never failed to call her, so that she might be the first to share in it. Those long glances we exchanged — across the glass of the recording studio, filled with emotion — will remain the mark of our deepest friendship.

Pupi

Opening image: Pupi Avati, the director for over two decades has collaborated with Riz Ortolani on the music of many of his most poignant and acclaimed films.