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“Working With the Storyboard Was Crucial:” Editor Giorgia Villa on GEN_

A bald man wears a doctors coat and classes.GEN_, courtesy of Sundance Institute.

GEN_, the latest documentary from filmmaker Gianluca Matarrese, follows Dr. Maurizio Bini and his medical team at Milan’s Niguarda public hospital. Specializing in gender-affirming care as well as in vitro, Dr. Bini provides care to patients whose identities are increasingly politicized amid the rise of far-right conservatism. 

Editor Giorgia Villa discusses her hands-on education background, longtime collaboration with Matarrese and the similarities between music and editing.

See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here.

Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?

Villa: Gianluca Matarrese and I have previously worked together on editing his earlier films, such as La Dernière Séance (The Last Chapter), Il Posto (A Steady Job), and L’Expérience Zola (The Zola experience). Over time, we developed a strong professional bond (as well as a friendship), and our collaboration in editing is also based on my contribution to shaping the narrative. I believe Gianluca chose me for this film, among other reasons, because, especially in this case, where there is a unity of place and recurring situations, there was a great deal of narrative construction that needed to be developed together during editing.

Filmmaker: In terms of advancing your film from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were your goals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to enhance, or preserve, or tease out or totally reshape?

Villa: GEN_ is a film entirely set in an Italian public hospital, where both medically assisted procreation (PMA) and gender transition procedures are practiced in the same department. Since the film is set in a doctor’s office, with a single location and repetitive situations, the consultations of Dr. Bini with his patients, one of the main challenges in the editing process was to avoid the film becoming a mere succession of medical visits. Even though each patient brings their own sensitivity and particular situation, which is always different from the others, we had to avoid the risk of it turning into a “case list” or a “telephone directory,” which would have prevented the audience from maintaining real empathy with the film. Our main goal, therefore, was to create resonances between the different patients and the themes each one brought to the film, showing the humanity and attentiveness Dr. Bini offers his patients, while also exploring and revealing to the audience, throughout the film, the complexity and various facets of medically assisted procreation (PMA) and the transition journey.

When I first watched the footage, I also realized the complexity of the protagonist’s character: Dr. Bini is a doctor with vast experience and professionalism, a person of integrity, extremely attentive and sensitive, and very generous in sharing his knowledge. He is a doctor from another era. But at the same time, he can be too direct, at times brusque. Initially, I feared that some of these aspects of his character might prevent the audience from feeling empathy for him. As I continued to watch the footage, I began to understand his complexity and profound generosity better, and I realized that the other challenge would be to portray Dr. Bini in his entirety, balancing all the different elements, from his human side to his rigor in practicing his profession.

Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?

Villa: For me, one of the most important moments in the editing process is, of course, the phase of reviewing the footage. Gianluca had filmed about 140 hours of material, and I watched it all by myself, taking notes. While I was watching the material, we regularly communicated with Gianluca to discuss what I was seeing, and together we began to identify the key points of the film in the footage (confirming the important points for Gianluca, what motivated him to make this film) and determining which patients absolutely needed to be included in the edit.

I printed photos of all the patients and created a storyboard that we hung on the wall. We also made diagrams on the walls of the editing room to reflect on the structure. We had lists, diagrams, and photos everywhere in the editing room. In the meantime, we began to pre-edit the scenes of the patient consultations.

Initially, the material didn’t only include Dr. Bini’s consultations or the other scenes in the film, but Gianluca had also filmed the consultations with the psychologist and the urologist. Additionally, there were meetings with pharmaceutical representatives, departmental meetings, and lectures and conferences that Dr. Bini had attended. So, in our early drafts, we tried to fit everything into the structure of the film.

We created a first 4-hour draft with the initial selections and showed it to the co-author of the film, the producers, and a few other people to gather feedback. This helped us distance ourselves from the material and make some radical decisions.

In addition to the patient consultations and all the themes they bring, there are other elements that make up the film: the life of the hospital, Bini’s relationship with nature (his moments of silence and breath), the instability of working in the public hospital system, and the ongoing construction work that visibly represented this precariousness. These elements serve as a counterpoint to the patient consultations and also provide moments of respite.

Working with the storyboard was crucial in building the narrative, helping us distance ourselves from the editing timeline and understand where the film needed these breaks and how to balance these moments throughout the flow of the film.

Filmmaker: As an editor, how did you come up in the business, and what influences have affected your work?

Villa: I’ve been living in Paris for 10 years, but I was born and raised in Italy, where I grew up and trained. I attended a high school in Rome with a focus on cinema, specializing in editing. After graduation, I tried to get into the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, but I didn’t pass the final test. So, I did an internship as an assistant editor, and then I started working as a first assistant editor on fiction films, a job I continued for many years. I learned the art of editing in the editing room, observing some brilliant Italian editors at work. 

I was working on fiction films, but documentary cinema intrigued me a lot. At that time, very few documentaries were being produced in Italy, and I knew that the documentary industry in France was much more developed. I was also in love with Paris, especially with its special relationship to cinema and, more broadly, to the arts: painting, music, theater…I knew there was an important documentary school in Paris founded by the director Jean Rouch, called Ateliers Varan, so I decided to enroll in their documentary editing course. I ended up staying here to live. It was in Paris that I finally found the “legitimacy,” after many years of working as an assistant in Italy, to become an editor. 

Another great passion of mine is music, which is part of my daily life. As a child, I wanted to be a musician, and for years I felt a bit frustrated for not having pursued that path. But one day I realized there was a connection between music and editing, and that my love for music was being expressed through editing. That’s when it felt like the circle closed. Today, I edit both fiction films and documentaries, and I find it extremely important to move between these two worlds, which are increasingly connected to one another. 

Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?

Villa: I used Avid Media Composer to edit this film because it is the software I consider the most reliable, especially for managing audio and video files. This reliability (in addition to the fact that I know it very well because I’ve been using it for many years) allows me to focus entirely on the creative side, without worrying about technical issues. For Gianluca’s previous films, we used Adobe Premiere because it’s a software he is familiar with. For those projects, even during the shooting, Gianluca felt the need to start exploring the footage he was capturing and made rough cuts, even before we began working together on the final edit. For GEN_, Gianluca agreed to use Avid Media Composer because he preferred to take a step back and not be directly involved in the editing process, as he had been in the previous films.

Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?

Villa: In addition to the patient visits made by Dr. Bini, Gianluca had also filmed other doctors who collaborate with Dr. Bini, such as the psychologist and the urologist. In the first draft of the film (the 4-hour version), the visits to the patients by these two doctors were included in the edit. Both the psychologist and the urologist were very interesting characters and helped convey the complexity of the department’s dynamics and the humanity with which patients are welcomed.

After the first draft, a big question arose: whether it would be better to focus solely on Dr. Bini’s office and tell the story through his perspective. For Gianluca, it was immediately clear that this was the right approach, while I must admit that I was very attached to those moments, and I struggled more than he did when we decided to cut those two characters from the film.

Filmmaker: Finally, now that the process is over, what new meanings has the film taken on for you? What did you discover in the footage that you might not have seen initially, and how does your final understanding of the film differ from the understanding that you began with?

Villa: I think I gradually came to understand the deeper meaning of the film during the viewing of the footage and the editing phase, while working closely with Gianluca and reflecting together on what we were doing. And I’ve definitely learned many things, as often happens when working on a project that tackles deep themes, ones that touch us in some way, and raises important questions.

I will probably discover new aspects when I see the film in the theater, observing the audience’s reactions. One thing that has certainly moved me every time I’ve watched the film and that I carry with me is the deeply political message that emerges through Dr. Bini’s modus operandi, which he never fails to reiterate to his colleagues and collaborators, namely that, as a doctor, his priority is always the patient, and that he must do what’s best for them, even at the cost of taking risks. In other words, it’s a concept that could and should be applied to everything, and sadly, today it’s not so obvious: before anything else, there are human beings.

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