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“There’s a Reason We Call Them ‘Films’ and Not ‘SD Cards'”: Francesco Sossai on His Cannes-Premiering The Last One for the Road
The Last One for the Road The film festival world can be so depressingly homogenous that to come across a title straying beyond its aesthetic and storytelling conventions is nothing short of exhilarating. The Last One for the Road is one such film. Conversant as it may be with a long and varied set of influences—from 1960s Italian comedies all the way to Aki Kaurismäki—Francesco Sossai’s second feature synthesizes its touchstones into something that feels bracingly alive. It heralds its writer-director as a new talent to watch, and confirms that the most exciting Italian cineastes working today are those shooting a long way away from the big cities the country’s cinema has historically orbited.
Set in Sossai’s native Veneto, an ostensibly prosperous industrial region in northeastern Italy, The Last One captures that backdrop as something closer to a decaying wasteland full of strange visions and stranger characters, none more so than the two inveterate drunks at its center. Fifty-something Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla) and Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano) have known each other all their lives; best friends and former coworkers at a sunglasses factory, they quit before the cops could incriminate them for stealing and reselling shades on the side, a racketeering scheme that earned them a small fortune they’ve since dissipated on a Jaguar and one too many drinks. Sossai and co-scribe Adriano Candiago follow the jaded drifters as they reminisce their halcyon days on a seemingly endless drinking spree that leads them to cross paths with a young architecture student, Giulio (Filippo Scotti). Which is to say The Last One unfurls as one wistful and alcohol-fueled road trip film, with the older wanderers trying to impart some wisdom to their travel companion, all while avoiding reckoning with the fact that their best years are over, and so are their childhood haunts.
But for all the nostalgia it oozes, this is no funereal watch. Sossai’s primary achievement lies in the lilting tone he sustains throughout, and his ability to avoid the kind of narrative exhaustion that’s befallen many entries to the same genre. That’s because The Last One—like the short that preceded it, The Birthday Party (2023)—straddles facts and hallucinations, toggling between delirious urban legends and more documentary-adjacent passages that see Sossai train his camera on the increasingly depopulated villages the three drive past. Hardly a wealthy, opulent landscape, Veneto is here immortalized as a string of spectrally empty houses and barren fields; it stands to reason that the journey should end at the Brion tomb, a grandiose memorial—part grave part Japanese garden—last seen standing in for the emperor’s mansion in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two (2024). Sossai shows an insider’s eye for the landscape’s textures. Shot by Massimiliano Kuveiller in 35mm and Super 16 and accompanied by composer Krano’s original score—ballads sung in the local dialect—The Last One is, first and foremost, a vivid and perceptive snapshot of a place that’s falling indelibly into the past.
The day after The Last One for the Road premiered in Cannes as part of the festival’s Un Certain Regard sidebar, I sat with Sossai to discuss the film’s tone, its geography and architecture, and how he went about capturing his childhood turf.
Filmmaker: The Last One for the Road begins with a kind of autobiographical overture: a factory worker who shares your surname, one Primo Sossai, is given a big retirement party and gifted a Rolex watch by his company’s founder. What made you want to insert yourself into the narrative that way?
Sossai: I wanted to let people into the film and I thought one way of doing that was to show them that there wasn’t any fiction to it. That was the starting point: to make a film that wouldn’t feel all that fictional. Films are based on this unspoken contract that forces you, the viewer, to pretend to believe in what the director shows you, and I think that contract nowadays is crumbling; fiction seems to be losing its ability to describe our world. On the other hand, I made a short just before this that was largely autobiographical, and I was keen to explore more of that side. In the end I settled for a kind of fictional autobiography; if people hear my surname right at the start they might think the story is true, which I trust helps you surrender more easily to it.
Filmmaker: Like that previous short, the whole film treads a fine line between facts and fiction, realism and magic. How do you see this tension between the two camps?
Sossai: Well, The Last One for the Road pivots on a friction between the way we imagine things and how those really are, which is basically what the final scene at the Brion tomb is all about. Giulio’s never seen the monument before but knows everything about it already. He might have read books about it, seen pictures, or the sketches [its architect] Carlo Scarpa drew. But once he gets there, he realizes he’d pictured a completely different thing. Reality doesn’t match his imagination. Maybe that speaks to the way I see the world, too.
Filmmaker: Could you talk about the script? I’d be curious to know if you had a particular image in mind that set the whole story in motion.
Sossai: I’m not sure how paradoxical this might sound but I like to think I work to shatter images, not so much to follow them. I’d rather not have any in my head when I work, because I always find that images wind up tricking you. Once you get attached to them you’ll inevitably strain to reach them, and that’s not interesting to me. I’d much rather let them emerge organically, like cream out of milk. The Last One for the Road is also the first film for which I did not storyboard. I would go to set without knowing how I’d block or stage the scene and just figure things out there and then. I suppose that made life a little difficult for my collaborators… [chuckles] But it was the right approach: I didn’t focus too much on images but tried to create them from scratch, just by being observant on set. My co-writer Adriano Candiago and I usually write and re-write until we get to a point when we just can’t imagine things anymore. I wouldn’t say the film’s starting point was an image so much as a place: the Brion tomb.
Filmmaker: One danger many road trip films face is to succumb to a kind of narrative exhaustion; sooner or later, the journey starts to lag and stops giving you things to think about. Not so for The Last One for the Road. How did you sustain the film’s tempo?
Sossai: That too comes down to our habit of writing and re-writing lots. Each time we revise a draft we end up subtracting things from it, until we get to a more or less uniform narrative density. We were also lucky to work with a terrific script consultant, Franz Rodenkirchen, who helped us loads on that front. At the same time, I think that has to do with my particular way of directing, and with the editing, too. Our editor, Paolo Cottignola—who’s worked with filmmakers like Ermanno Olmi and Carlo Mazzacurati—was the one who first taught me this idea of the narrative density: the film should never stop saying things.
Filmmaker: Yet for all the things the film reveals there are several others that you keep hidden. A few supposed “life lessons” and big secrets that characters claim to have found are drowned out by loud diegetic sounds: a helicopter taking off, a train departing. What was the reasoning behind these ellipses?
Sossai: There are three different perspectives in the film, and I think the ellipses you’re referring to hinge on the constant shifting between them. We begin with a kind of omniscient POV, then move to Doriano and Carlobianchi’s, and finally, almost without one even noticing, we embrace Giulio’s. It’s as if we danced between three narrative planes. John Ford did something similar in The Searchers, which is something I’ve always loved about it. It’s as we were encouraged to identify with Ethan, at first: he’s just come back from the war, and sets out to rescue the kid. But there’s a scene when the man slaughters a herd of buffalos just so that the Native Americans won’t be able to eat them, and it’s a moment so barbaric it becomes impossible for us to side with him anymore, so the film slowly starts embracing Martin’s perspective instead. I’ve always found that to be such an elegant way to change POVs, and that’s what I wanted to do here.
Filmmaker: I wonder if these shifts between perspectives also account for the film’s tonal whiplash. Sure, this is often a painfully nostalgic film, but it’s never funereal; there’s plenty of humor throughout. Could you speak about how you handled the tone?
Sossai: I suppose that’s just how I see life: ridiculous, illogical, sometimes heart-breaking… And I’m lucky to write with someone who shares the same worldview; we complement each other very well. But I didn’t have a specific tone I wanted to achieve and stick to—much like with images, I think if you start out with a specific idea of the film’s mood then that will likely come across as fake. When I began writing the script, I had no idea which tone it’d take. I can see why this mix of sadness and humor works, but the first thing I focused on was trying to nail these characters’ distinctive voices. Once you figure that out, experience tells me everything flows. And I know that everyone’s banging on about the fact that this is a road movie, but as far as I see it the film’s biggest influence is the Commedia all’italiana, the Italian-style comedies from the fifties and sixties. The films of Dino Risi, Mario Monicelli, but also a few outliers too—Marco Ferreri’s The Big Feast among them. Baroque as they might be, they have a way of capturing life that I find truly vivid.
Filmmaker: I was hoping you could talk about the film’s locations, and the emphasis you place on the kind of cultural contamination the region seems to be suffering. Time and again we hear characters complain that the place is losing its identity.
Sossai: That’s the heart of the film—this idea that globalization has led us to a near-complete uniformity, a stifling homogeneity. Strange as it is to admit I find it difficult to travel these days; it’s like it doesn’t interest me anymore. It’s just that everywhere looks the same, and I can’t muster enough enthusiasm to pack up and go as I once did. That’s the frustrating dilemma that fuels the film: can one really travel, in 2025? I think the only meaningful way to do that is on a small scale. At its core, The Last One for the Road is about the massive transformations—cultural and physical—our landscape is going through, and that’s what I find most interesting about those Italian comedies from the 1960s. One way or another, they’re all trying to explore how the country changed as a result of the extraordinary socioeconomic conflicts propelled by the so-called economic “boom” of that decade. Just think of the films of Antonioni, or Pasolini—they’re all concerned with these tectonic shifts.
Filmmaker: Save perhaps for the Brion tomb, The Last One for the Road unfurls by and large across liminal spaces: diners, parking lots, empty streets. Even as the three finally get to Venice you trade tourist-friendly depictions of the city for something more authentic, lived-in: a small piazza, a local bar, some alley. Why that kind of blurring?
Sossai: I think there’s something almost immoral about chasing “pretty” images; I always feel that when images are too beautiful that’s because they’re trying to sell you something, so much so that sometimes I genuinely struggle to see the difference between certain movies and commercials. And I wanted to make a film whose aesthetic would be radically different from that. It’s easy when you shoot in a place like Venice to succumb to those fake, postcard-like portraits of the city. But once you kill those, you have room to think anew. The Venice you see in the film is the city as I experience it: a series of real hangouts—bacari, campos, calli—that you’d be hard-pressed to find on postcards or tourist guides. More broadly, I wrote the script thinking about these specific places. If I don’t exactly know where a scene is set, I just can’t write it. I can’t jot down stuff like “interior-apartment”—if I don’t know how that looks, it’s hopeless.
Filmmaker: Could you speak about the role architecture plays in the film?
Sossai: I’d say it’s its cornerstone. On the one hand, architecture serves as a kind of meeting point for Giulio and his older travel companions, but there’s something more profound to it, too. [Art historian] Philippe Daverio once said that Italians are “intimately architectural”, and I think he’s right. Carlobianchi and Doriano may not be architects, strictly speaking, but so many of their chats hinge on that topic. The way they glance at some of the houses they drive past, wondering if they’ll ever be able to afford them… Their affinity with architecture—and its influence over them—is really quite strong. And I liked the idea of the three meeting at Scarpa’s Brion tomb, because the monument is almost a sort of land art. It’s deeply rooted in the landscape that surrounds it but at the same time it stands as a strange oddity; it’s something you’d expect to see in Japan. It embodies a cultural syncretism which I find very fascinating, and I used tatami shots for the entire sequence so as to heighten that dislocation. That’s the one moment in the film that’s absolutely fiction-less; I just wanted to take you to see the grave.
Filmmaker: Still on the subject of images, how did your collaboration with DOP Massimiliano Kuveiller unfold? This is your first time working together. What sort of visual references did you discuss?
Sossai: What I love most about him—besides his unparalleled skills, of course—is the fact that his taste and approach are somewhat untimely; people don’t make films the way he does anymore. But as far as visual references are concerned, I don’t really like to discuss too many of those. We did talk about [High Renaissance Italian painter] Giorgione a lot, because his approach seemed especially attuned to ours. We wanted to think about and capture the landscape first, and then place people inside it, which is a visual hierarchy that’s very prominent in Giorgione’s paintings. I also gave him a book by Luigi Ghirri, Pensiero Paesaggio, which seemed to me to elaborate on those points. Mostly though, I showed him around. Massimiliano’s from Rome, and we spent a while travelling around the region so he could become familiar with its specific light, which in the end he captured beautifully.
Filmmaker: You toggled between Super 16 and 35mm; what is it that attracts you about film?
Sossai: Well, there’s a reason we call them “films” and not “SD cards”; I genuinely can’t imagine working with anything other than celluloid. We all carry digital devices in our pockets with which we routinely capture reality; the way I see it, the threat for cinema is to start looking like a mere extension of those images. There’s also the fact that shooting on film forces you to be much more precise. You shoot a lot less, make many more decisions on set, and in the end have less material to work with and cut. But there’s also something almost mystical about the choice. Shooting in the Brion tomb the way we did meant conjuring the specters of its architect and Ozu both; I could have never filmed that sequence on digital. It seems to me that, for some, the desire to shoot on digital rests on the assumption that only a contemporary aesthetic can truly capture the world we live in. But that’s nonsense. If anything, it’s the complete opposite; only a format that’s somehow disjointed from the mainstream aesthetic of our twenty-first century can really capture its light.
Filmmaker: Music plays a prominent role throughout; I was hoping you could discuss your collaboration with the film’s composer, Krano. His original score is all in dialect, but the melodies reminded me of some American folk songs from the 1960s and 1970s.
Sossai: I used to have this almost Bressonian anxiety about music and my first two films had none of it. Here, I wanted the opposite. There’s plenty of diegetic and non-diegetic tracks—including a few live performances, one featuring Krano himself. I liked the idea of creating this Veneto-themed playlist, stuffed with bands I like and regularly listen to, like Laguna Bollente, Krano, and others… And since The Last One for the Road is set in a largely underrepresented part of the country I wanted the score to speak to that same marginality: it’s the sort of music that’s very rooted in the territory but at the same time peripheral. As for Krano specifically, I just thought he’d be perfect for the film because his way of working feels very similar to our own—he likes to record using analogue means, works by and large alone, and sings in our dialect, Veneto. Sure, he’s hyper-local. But once you listen to his music you don’t really have to follow the lyrics so much; you can let yourself be carried away by the melodies, which as you said hark back to a certain folk tradition from the States. I don’t think it’s the kind of score that manipulates you into feeling this or that emotion, but it nonetheless feels of a piece with the film’s aesthetic.
Filmmaker: I’d love to hear how you went about casting for the film. How did you cross paths with Sergio Romano, Pierpaolo Capovilla, and Filippo Scotti? And what made you think they’d be perfect for their roles?
Sossai: I first saw Sergio in a film made by my friend and associate producer Alessandro Roja, Con la grazia di un Dio, and he made quite an impression on me. The film was set in Genoa and I assumed Sergio was from there; turns out he’s from Lombardy, and just preternaturally talented at immersing himself in different places and soaking in their textures. He came to live in my village for a while, just so that he could study the way people speak and move, their gestures and intonation. As for Pierpaolo, I’ve long been a fan of his band, Il Teatro degli Orrori: there’s a particular energy that emanates from his music, which always feels on the verge of collapsing, and I was keen to see how he could channel that into Doriano. Filippo I’d seen in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God, and when we met I gave him a book of short stories by a writer from my region, Goffredo Parise’s I Sillabari. A few days later he phoned me and told me that one of them, “Gli Altri,” had left him in tears; that’s when I knew he had just the right sensibility for the part. We rehearsed a lot—I don’t mean actual scenes for the film, but things that I thought would help them understand their characters. To go back to Bresson, I wasn’t interested in what they wanted to show me but in what they didn’t know they had. Pierpaolo says it was like going to therapy… [chuckles]
Filmmaker: How long did you shoot in the end?
Sossai: We rehearsed for about a month and a half, and shot for five weeks, which isn’t all that long for a film with 104 scenes and 42 locations. We had to run a lot in the end.
Filmmaker: I always find it so refreshing to see Italian filmmakers set their stories far away from the big cities which our cinema has historically orbited. I wonder if you see any relationship between your oeuvre and that of fellow Italian directors working today.
Sossai: I’m not sure I do, to be perfectly honest! [laughs] I went to film school in Germany, which maybe accounts for my distinct approach and way of looking at the world. Though I do feel a strong affinity for the cinema of Matteo Zoppis and Alessio Rigo de Righi. Sure, we do very different things, but we share the same desire to resurrect old genres and used them to say something new. Looking back to look ahead: this is what unites us, and what characterizes the cinema I feel most drawn to.
