cinematography
Marco Parolin
editing
Carlo Maria Manieri
music
Cosimo Messeri
sound
Alessandra Morelli
Ignazio Vellucci
Marco Falloni

cast
Cosimo Messeri (Himself)

production
Kaplan
producers
Cosimo Messeri
Andrea Monteforte
Edoardo Scarantino

Italian press office
Sofia Sandrelli

After years of “director’s block”, discouraged by the failure of several of his film projects to ever see the light of day, a filmmaker (Cosimo Messeri) decides to come to terms with his own recent past. He decides to track down and interview the women he’d met on dating apps during that troubled time in his life. With the help of two friends, he turned this experiment into a film that is part-documentary, part-confessional. His encounters, memories, and often painful confrontations combine to form a portrait of man grappling repeatedly with defeat, missed opportunities, and the need to make sense of it all. In this sort of inventory of what is lost and what can be salvaged, he is surprised by something he didn’t expect to find: the chance and the will to start over.

2026 Il massacro
2017 Metti una notte
2012 Block Notes di Habemus Papam (doc)
2009 The One Man Beatles (doc)
2006 Zeldman (short)

“For ten years, I could not get a film made. At one point, I didn’t know if it was cinema or life itself that I missed. So I started from scratch, looking up the people I had met back then, faces I had all but forgotten. I wanted to know what they remembered and where they were now. Yet every reply edged the question a little closer to me. The result was The Massacre. Not about those years in the desert, but how to get to the other side, and learn what it had done to me, and whether, in the sands, there was still something alive.” (Cosimo Messeri)

After working as an AD to Nanni Moretti and Carlo Mazzacurati, in 2009 Cosimo Messeri (Fiesole), made the documentary The One Man Beatles in Los Angeles. A portrait of the American singer-songwriter Emitt Rhodes, it won a David di Donatello nomination for best documentary. An actor and musician as well, Messeri directed his first feature film, Metti una notte, in 2017, which earned him the Panorama Italiano Award at the Rome Film Fest.