Trieste Film Festival 2025: We Are the Errors (dir. Erika Rossi) | Review
We Are the Errors, a documentary feature about the founding and development of a Triestian forward-thinking theatre group consisting of actors with mental illness diagnosis gathered in Accademia della Follia was screened out of competition at Trieste Film Festival.
I was intrigued by the title of the Italian documentary We Are the Errors (Noi siamo gli errori che permettono la vostra intelligenza, 2024) and went to see it on a whim without having read what the film was about. From the off, I was tumbled about in a confounding and amazing world of Accademia della Follia.
The film starts with a monty-pythonesque sequence of a group of actors coming down a field towards the camera. The image is grainy and the colours are faded, but the theatre group stands out – some in crimson robes, others in white coats. They are immediately strange, while carrying a hospital bed with a tortured patient on it. It takes a while to understand the motivation behind the performance.
It turns out to be one man, tortured by his experience of the unjust justice system that had him imprisoned while innocent that made a lasting, psychological impact on him. “I lost my body and my mind was fragmented,” he describes. He is Claudio Misculin, the founder of the Accademia della Follia theatre, and a self-proclaimed madman by choice. He is the instigator behind the project that in the 70s saw the overtaking of the former psychiatric hospital in Trieste by his theatre group.
We are the errors that enable your intelligence (the full title of the film in Italian) is one of the group’s slogans. The actors brainstorm through Misculin’s ideas throughout the documentary trying to find the basis on which to continue following the artistic director’s sudden death in 2019. We are mad by trade and actors by vocation, they explain.
Misculin’s recordings taken during his career and various projects are a showcase of physical, underground theatre that focuses on voice, movement, body and space. Contemporary interviews are intertwined with archival footage of Misculin’s performances and TV interviews. It is a challenging mix of information whose point is not that clear to a foreign audience until some further research.
Once you realise that Accademia della Follia took upon itself to collect the memories and present the horrors of forceful psychiatric incarceration and decided to give the stage to the actors diagnosed with mental illnesses, you are transfixed with their artistic imagination and social relevance. The stage and projects of the group allows human beings to “tear off the mask of madness that forced them to be just and within their diagnosis”. A powerful statement and impressive mission.
Director Erika Rossi builds a respectful and expressive hommage to Misculin and his life work without much artistic intervention of her own. The film is straightforward and plain in it’s collection of interviews and stage recordings. But the message and the delivery is breathtaking.
Film Fest Report is a proud media partner of the 2025 Trieste Film Festival.
