Circle interviews with the Alumni: Meet Irene Dionisio - CIRCLE Fiction Orbit Accelerator 2023 participant.
We've asked our Alumni to share their Circle experience with us: motivation, outcomes, how
it helped them shaped their projects and what it means to be part of the Circle family along with their views on the current cinema landscape and how gender has been an asset or barrier.
Q. Please introduce yourself and your project, IDDA, briefly.
My name is Irene Dionisio, and I am an Italian filmmaker and artist. My work moves between cinema poetry and visual art, often exploring intimate relationships, identity, memory and the social and political forces that shape our lives.
IDDA is my second fiction feature film. It is a story about relationships, distance and transformation, set against a world in which personal and collective questions constantly intersect. The film looks at its characters with great attention to their emotional complexity, their contradictions and the spaces—both physical and psychological—in which they try to find their place.
Q. What made you apply for CIRCLE Fiction Orbit with IDDA in 2023?
At that stage, IDDA was a project that was very important to me, but it was still searching for its final form. I felt that the film needed a space in which I could discuss it openly, question some of my choices and develop it through dialogue with other filmmakers and professionals.
I applied - with Kino Produzioni - to CIRCLE Fiction Orbit because of its focus on projects led by women and gender-expansive filmmakers, and because I was looking for a context that combined artistic development with a strong sense of community. I was also interested in meeting other filmmakers at a similar stage, facing comparable challenges while developing ambitious and personal projects.
Q. How did participating in CIRCLE Fiction Orbit help you and/or shape the development of the project?
CIRCLE gave me the opportunity to step back from the project and look at it from a different perspective. The discussions helped me understand more clearly what the core of the film was, what I wanted the audience to feel and which elements were essential to the story.
The feedback I received was very valuable, not because it provided ready-made solutions, but because it encouraged me to ask more precise questions. It helped me strengthen the characters, clarify the structure and find a better balance between the intimate dimension of the film and its broader social and political implications.
The group itself was also fundamental. Sharing the process with other women filmmakers created a rare environment of trust, generosity and mutual support. That experience stayed with me throughout the later stages of writing, financing and production.
The film has evolved considerably. The project I brought to CIRCLE was already emotionally and thematically close to the film I wanted to make, but its structure and tone were still more open.
Since then, the characters have become more defined, and the narrative has acquired greater precision. I have also learned to trust silence, ambiguity and the small gestures through which the characters reveal themselves. The film has become more essential, both formally and emotionally.
At the same time, its central concerns have remained intact. The development process did not change the heart of IDDA; it helped me get closer to it. The film that premiered at TIFF is the result of a long process of listening, questioning and gradually understanding what the project needed to become.
Q. What kind of issues do women filmmakers experience in the industry related to their gender? Could you also speak from your own experience?
Women filmmakers still have to work within an industry in which access to resources, authority and professional recognition is not equally distributed. Women are often expected to prove their competence repeatedly, while their artistic choices may be questioned or interpreted through gendered assumptions.
There can also be pressure to make work that is immediately legible as “female,” particularly when it deals with intimacy, care, the body or personal experience. At the same time, women are sometimes discouraged from occupying spaces associated with ambition, scale, authority or risk.
In my own experience, I have encountered situations in which I felt I had to be especially prepared and particularly clear in order to be taken seriously. I have also felt the pressure to justify decisions that would perhaps have been accepted more readily from a male filmmaker. These experiences are not always explicit; often they are embedded in professional habits, expectations and power structures.
However, I have also encountered solidarity and meaningful forms of support, especially from other women and gender-expansive professionals. This is why initiatives such as CIRCLE are so important: they do not only support individual projects but also help create new networks and forms of collective strength.
Q. What are the most challenging and rewarding aspects of being a filmmaker in the current world circumstances? What advice would you give to yourself and to other filmmakers?
One of the greatest challenges is continuing to make complex, personal and formally ambitious films in a context marked by uncertainty, economic pressure and profound social and political instability. There is often pressure to make work that is immediately understandable, marketable or fast, while filmmaking requires time, patience and the courage to remain with difficult questions.
At the same time, this is also what makes the work rewarding. Cinema can create a space for attention and connection. It allows us to look at reality from unexpected points of view and to imagine relationships, communities and possibilities that may not yet exist.
My advice to myself and to other filmmakers would be to protect the necessity at the heart of the project. To remain open to change, but not to lose sight of why the film was conceived in the first place. It is important to listen to others without allowing external expectations to replace one’s own voice.
I would also say that filmmaking should not be experienced as an entirely solitary process. Building alliances, asking for help and supporting other filmmakers are not secondary activities; they are part of the work. In difficult circumstances, community can be a form of resistance.
Q. What does reaching this stage with IDDA and premiering at TIFF mean to you personally and professionally?
The premiere at TIFF is an incredibly important moment for me, both personally and professionally. IDDA has been part of my life for many years, and reaching an audience through such an important international festival makes the long and often uncertain journey of the film feel tangible.
Personally, it is a moment of gratitude—to the cast, the crew, the producers and all the people who believed in the project and helped it move forward. It is also an emotional experience to see a film that began as a fragile idea enter the world and become open to the interpretations of others.
Professionally, being part of the Platform Competition gives the film an extraordinary visibility and creates the possibility of meeting audiences, programmers, distributors and filmmakers from around the world. But beyond recognition, what matters most to me is that IDDA can begin a conversation.
A film is completed, in a sense, when it leaves the hands of its creators. I am very happy that IDDA is now beginning this new life, and I hope that it can reach people in different places and remain with them in some way.
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