This film is the highly personal story of the moments I spent with my father that remain most vivid and intact in my memory, told through a succession of faceto- face encounters. It is a personal story which I believe nevertheless achieves the right sense of distance, given that between father and daughter there is always a shared passion for cinema, as a life choice and a way of being in the world. After many years spent doing the same job that he did while trying to be different from him, I wanted to recount how everything I am, I owe to him. I wanted to pay homage to my father, his way of making cinema, his way of being; to the importance that his work and commitment have had for our cinema; and to what he meant to me personally. Francesca Comencini has admitted to finally feeling ready to accept herself as “the daughter of ” … and how the desire to honour her father’s memory and the role he played in the darkest period of her life – when she was suffering from drug addiction – drove her to write and direct Il tempo che ci vuole … The role of the father (a splendid Fabrizio Gifuni) here becomes so important that it literally cancels out all the other members of the family: when the story brings father and daughter face-to-face … there is nobody else in the scene; nobody can disturb a relationship which the director- screenwriter evidently feels (felt) to be absolute and all-encompassing As a counterpoint to the loneliness of the house where the father-daughter bond is created and grows, there is the chaos of the set: that of Pinocchio first, and later that of her father’s final film, The Miracle of Marcelino. The different roles played by Francesca – initially young and fascinated by cinema, later an adult who has become an assistant director – serve once again to pay homage to the professional figure of Luigi, his desire to make films that “people would understand”, his idea that “life came first and then cinema” … Beginning with a news item but transcending it through the power of abstraction and expressive synthesis, Francesca Comencini achieves the perfect balance between memory and fiction.

Paolo Mereghetti, “Corriere della Sera”, 23 September 2024