Less than one year after the producers met at the Locarno Film Festival‘s Alliance 4 Development co-development platform, “Primo Viaggio,” produced by Italy’s Sacher Film and France’s Halley Production, has wrapped after shooting on location in Naples, Málaga and Marseille between June and July of this year.
Written and directed by Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman, behind award-winning pics “Californie” and “Vittoria,” “Primo Viaggio” is now bound for the Venice Film Festival’s Gap-Financing Market, where the producers aim to connect with potential sales agents, festival programmers and investors.
Mario Di Frenna stars as Carlo in ‘Primo Viaggio.’
Courtesy of Sacher Film
“Primo Viaggio” (which translates to “First Trip”) follows Carlo, a 20-year-old from Naples who, in an effort to improve his bleak existence, agrees to transport narcotics from Málaga, Spain, back to Italy. It’s the first time he has stepped out of his neighborhood and his insular world, however, and the people he meets while in Spain awaken something within him, leading to a detour that alters the course of his life.
The project initially came together last year when Andrea Marcelli of Paris-based Halley Production met Sacher Film’s Benedetta Barroero, who is producing alongside Nanni Moretti, at Locarno during the Alliance 4 Development co-development platform for film projects from Austria, France, Germany and Switzerland.
“We hit it off immediately, and given the film’s story, a co-production with France felt natural and organic,” Marcelli told Variety. “A relationship grew from there that deepened over time into a genuine collaboration, with the directors as well. I’m a French producer but Italian by origin, so exchanges between us are quick and fluid, and also keeping Italian cinema and Italian stories alive matters a great deal to me.”
The project, he added, is “very much in the great tradition of the Franco-Italian co-productions of the past.”
In making the film, Cassigoli and Kauffman sought to retain the realism that characterized “Californie” and “Vittoria,” which won Venice’s best Italian film prize in 2024.
It was those elements that drew Marcelli to the project: “It’s precisely the directors’ method, the way they move between reality and fiction, and their attentive, deeply human gaze on the fate of this young character whose life changes radically through a change of environment. Whether it’s a new place or a chance encounter, this film is about the kind of experience that alters our inner chemistry and allows us to imagine ourselves differently. A universal theme.”
Cassigoli and Kauffman’s embrace of realism really distinguishes the film, he added, noting that the lead cast, Mario Di Frenna, Sarah-Louna Darnon and Lucky Salvadori, are all non-professional actors.
“Their cinema starts from reality and feeds off it,” Marcelli pointed out. “Mario Di Frenna, the protagonist, who was cast through a long street-casting process, is a young man who could have lived Carlo’s story exactly, his alter ego in the fiction.”
The story of Carlo’s first journey abroad also offers an interesting cross-border dimension, he added.
“The film traces a Mediterranean arc, and we were struck by how much the three cities, Naples, Málaga, Marseille, resemble one another: similar young people, similar problems, but also a shared rhythm and atmosphere.”
Halley Production’s other recent credits include Manuel Gómez Pereira’s 2025 Goya-winning Spanish hit “The Dinner” (“La cena”), on which it also served as co-producer.
