La vita segreta dei giocattoli, a documentary film written and directed by Alexandra D’Onofrio and Sara Zavarise, will make its world premiere at the 22° Biografilm Festival. The film follows Roberto Papetti, one of the most famous and one of the last master toy makers working in Italy today, on a journey with children across the country through imagination, craftsmanship, peace and ecology. Produced by Zalab Film with the support of the Regione Emilia-Romagna through the Emilia-Romagna Film Commission, the film was screened among the special events of the festival, in the presence of the authors and Roberto Papetti himself, on Saturday, June 6 at 5:30 p.m. at the BIOGRAFILM HERA THEATRE | Pop Up Cinema Arlecchino.
At the heart of the film is the extraordinary figure of Roberto Papetti, from Ravenna, one of the last and most authoritative toy artists in Italy: a master toy maker, educator and tireless experimenter who has spent decades transforming reclaimed materials into works capable of sparking imagination, memory and critical thought. Founder, in the 1980s, of the environmental education centre La Lucertola and a national reference point for the pedagogy of play, Papetti leads the story through a journey across Italy, from Palermo to the Lido di Venezia and Roma. At each stop, he holds workshops with children, creating the toys that best represent his poetic vision: in Palermo, the bestiario da cassetta da frutta; at the Lido di Venezia, Marina la Sirena; and in Roma, the Pacifici. Here, the creative gesture becomes an opportunity for encounter and shared reflection: building toys means questioning the value of recycling, our relationship with nature, peace, and the possibility of imagining new ways of inhabiting the world.
The film is accompanied by Papetti’s own voice, weaving together thoughts, memories and intuitions in an intimate and poetic narration. In his studio-bottega in Ravenna, surrounded by wood, collected objects and traces of past projects, Roberto works on a piece that is revealed only in the finale: L’Equilibrista, a land art sculpture that he carries along the fiume Lamone in memory of the 2023 flood, as a symbol of the fragile relationship between human beings and nature. At the same time, the documentary also follows him at a crucial moment in his career: the preparation of his first major retrospective at the MAR di Ravenna, marking an important recognition of his artistic research. It is the first time Papetti’s work receives full institutional visibility, after a path long positioned at the margins of the art system.
The story is enriched by stop-motion animation sequences that bring the toys to life away from the gaze of their creator and the children, restoring on screen the magical and animist dimension that runs throughout the film: the idea that toys may hold desires, memory and even dreams.
During the festival, La vita segreta dei giocattoli will also be presented to the young inmates of the IPM Pietro Siciliani di Bologna as part of Biografilm’s educational project Tutta un’altra storia.
Alexandra D’Onofrio is a visual anthropologist and filmmaker whose work combines field research and participatory audiovisual practices developed in Italia, Marocco, Francia and Egitto. She teaches visual anthropology and ethnographic documentary at the Università di Manchester and also works as a programmer for the documentary festival of Atene, Ethnofest. Her documentaries include Era domani and La vita che non C.I.E. Her latest film, A Letter to China Town, co-directed with researcher Elena Barabantseva, is about to be released.
Sara Zavarise is a documentary filmmaker and editor specializing in auteur cinema and documentaries, with a particular focus on human rights, migration and community development. A co-founding member of ZaLab, she has edited numerous works presented at international festivals, including Il castello indistruttibile at IDFA and CPH, Io sono Li by Andrea Segre, presented at Giornate degli Autori and winner of the Premio LUX, La prima neve, presented in Orizzonti at Venezia 70, and Indebito by Andrea Segre and Vinicio Capossela, presented at Locarno. Her work as a director includes the co-directed documentary short Celeste, donne anziane che parlano di amore, winner of the Premio Train de Vie at the Filmmaker Festival, and Maji, winner of the Premio UNICEF at the Mestre Film Festival.
ZaLab Film is a production and distribution company founded in 2014 as an independent and creative cinema workshop with a strong social vocation. Founded by Andrea Segre, Matteo Calore, Stefano Collizzolli, Michele Aiello and Sara Zavarise, ZaLab develops documentaries that address current issues, contemporary conflicts and social dynamics, with the aim of bringing cinema del reale to a broad audience through cinemas, festivals and platforms. Documentaries produced by ZaLab have premiered at some of the most important international festivals, including Mostra del Cinema di Venezia, Locarno FF, Torino FF, IDFA, Hot Docs, Vision du Réel, DOK Leipzig and DOK.fest Munich, and have been broadcast by major national networks.
Synopsis
“What if toys were the only objects that dream?” This is the sentence that underpins the arc of the documentary, which follows Roberto Papetti, one of the most famous and one of the last master toy makers working in Italy today, on a journey in contact with children across the country.
Roberto leads workshops around the toys that best represent him: in Palermo, he brings the bestiario da cassetta da frutta; at the Lido di Venezia, Marina la Sirena; and in Roma, the Pacifici. These toys come to life through animation, representing the animist soul that Roberto and the children attribute to toys and adding a touch of magic to the story.
Founder, in the 1980s, of the environmental education centre La Lucertola, Papetti is a national reference point for childhood education. Today, his research develops both on a purely artistic level, where he gives the toy the value of a work of art exhibited in shows dedicated to him, and on the level of the pedagogy of play within Italian play culture, where he continues to attract a wide following among teachers and scholars.
A documentary about the self-construction of toys as a way to address some of today’s most urgent and universal themes: peace, ecology, recycling, criticism of consumerism, and the transmission of knowledge.
