Critical Evaluation - Giorgio

When I was first approached by Sara to jump on her project, I was a bit unsure, since I have been only doing commercial videos and documentaries and I have never worked on a short film project before. Therefore, I thought about it for a few minutes.. and I said yes!

That was my challenge. A great opportunity to learn to work in a group with people of different roles. And it definitely paid off.

In fact, what I can say is that I have been really surprised by the fact that everyone in the group did his absolute best to make this project look great. Khayat and Sara have always been available, always been up to change their schedule to film with the best light and I appreciated this so much.

From a technical point of view, I definitely improved with using professional cameras such as the Black magic and the C300. I have used them before but not for a long shoots, like I had to do for this movie. I am honestly very proud of my improvements.

But, in my opinion, I can definitely say that I have made progress regarding the storytelling: cinema is a special, sometimes silent, but at the same time powerful language, that can inspire the audience with very deep messages. This is the reason why being a filmmaker is, in my opinion, a great responsibility.

In this case, our aim was to help other young people, like us (none of us come from the UK), to be aware of the “Culture Shock”, that is something that can easily happen and that can have serious consequences on mental health, if not faced in the right way.

“Go out, see how London beautiful is” - says the stranger to Maria. So, what does that “ beautiful” mean? It is not referred uniquely to how the city looks, but to what you can actually get from different cultures. In the “Independency “ part, Maria is a new person, aware of what makes her unique, and her beauty is reflected by the beauty of the city.

Working on this film moved me, since I remembered all the difficult moments that I went through when I first moved to London from Italy, so Maria’s story was also my personal story.

Thanks to everyone on the team for making me feel this incredible emotion.