He knows how to tell stories that are not at all banal and very evocative, Luca Noris, and above all he produces beautiful images to tell them.
The Italian documentary filmmaker, a multiple award-winner at numerous international festivals for his 'Isolated in Stromboli', spent a holiday on the Kenyan coast and immediately fell in love with it.
'I am not a newcomer to Africa,' Noris tells Malindikenya.net, 'and I don't usually travel for tourism. After a few days of relaxation, if the place I am in fascinates me, it automatically becomes the ideal setting for a film I am to shoot and I go in search of its peculiarities, its stories'.
A lover of adventure (he has travelled the whole of South Africa by tractor for work) and martial arts (he is an official reporter for the Italian Taekwondo Federation), Noris has previously directed a necessary and touching documentary in Rwanda, recounting the life of Father Hermann Shulz and the story of the mission he created during the terrible period of the Rwandan genocide.
"I have to admit that, having experienced the raw reality of Africa first hand, I was a bit biased about Malindi and its surroundings," admits the filmmaker, "but my friends Laura and Fausto convinced me to visit and I pleasantly changed my mind. The added value of Kenya is that from the tourist areas, which are in any case wonderful paradises, you can step off to the side and immerse yourself in situations that bring you back to ancestral Africa. The close relationship between these two realities, tourist development and traditions, create a uniqueness that I would like to capture in pictures and tell'.
Similarly, Noris was impressed by the settlement of the Italian community over the past decades.
"The Malindi I would like to tell is precisely this, an Italian-African story far from the clichés, where it makes sense to relate the parties in the clubs or in the splendid villas of our compatriots, with the smiles of ordinary people walking around the alleys of the old town, with the stories of those who arrived many years ago and saw this place grow and change and become a little Italian without ever losing its connotations. In short, a unique place in the world'.
After the excellent results of 'Isolated at Stromboli' in which he recounted a winter on the island with the fishermen and 'Iddu', the volcano in the role of narrator, Noris is now shooting another documentary in Sicily, recounting the last fishermen, their art and the traditions that are being lost. After 'Il sale nell'anima', this is the title he has chosen, the next tale from the sensitive, imaginative and deeply human lens of the Varese-based director could be Malindi.
'Yes, the Italian Malindi must be documented,' Noris confirms, 'and it will be the motivation that will drive me to return as soon as possible to an environment that has enchanted me. That's how I am, if I like a place, the second time I set foot there, I already have the story ready to shoot a film'.