Ivana Gloria finished Chlorophyll two days before it premiered at the Rome Film Fest, in a thousand-seat theater near the Vatican. A week later she had to move out of her apartment. She describes the stretch the way you might describe a wedding you were also catering yourself: two or three hundred people coming at you, the director’s life flipping from months alone in a room to a sudden explosion of social contact, and no time to feel any of it. That compression is worth sitting with, because it isn’t incidental to the movie she made. It’s the movie she made.
Chlorophyll is a fairy tale about Maia, a young woman whose hair and blood run green and who feels a pull toward trees and soil she can’t explain. She leaves the city to pick oranges in an orchard, where a shy loner named Teo tends to her the way he tends his plants. The premise sounds delicate. The production was anything but. Four weeks to shoot, one week to rehearse, a budget that ruled out almost every tool a director is supposed to reach for. The interesting thing about talking craft with Gloria is how often the best idea in a scene turns out to be the thing she did because she couldn’t afford the alternative.
The Camera as a Character
Gloria wanted long takes, the kind where the camera stops being an observer and starts behaving like a participant. With four weeks on the calendar, rehearsal was the only way to make that survivable, so she did something most first-time directors wouldn’t think to do: she shot the entire film in advance on her iPhone. During the one week she had on location, she gathered the whole team, the DP, the gaffer, the grip, the actors, the production designer, into the actual greenhouse and walked the picture end to end with her phone standing in for the camera. By the time the real shoot started, everyone knew their marks and the rig knew its path.
This is the unglamorous engine room of the single-take tradition. The reason Hitchcock could make Rope feel like one unbroken breath was relentless pre-planning, not improvisation. Gloria arrived at the same principle from the opposite direction, not from technical ambition but from scarcity, and got a film where the camera moves with the confidence of something that has done the walk a hundred times.
A Rain Machine Built From Garden Pipes
The clearest example of constraint turning into texture is the rain. Gloria needed a downpour for a scene that hinged on it. A proper rain machine ran about twenty thousand euros and couldn’t be hauled from Rome to the Sardinian location, so an engineer on the production team went out, bought pipes, and built one by hand that could cover three square meters. The first night looked great. On the second night the local municipality shut off the high-pressure water lines, the homemade machine died, and they finished the scene with ordinary gardening hoses.
Marcus Mizelle, who has done his own version of this with a garden hose on a porch roof for a music video years back, recognized the move instantly. The whole game, as he put it, is how wide you can go in the frame before the trick falls apart. Gloria kept it tight, and the rain reads as real. A bigger budget would’ve bought a machine and, with it, a more generic-looking storm.
Making the Invisible Audible
Sound is where Chlorophyll does its most deliberate work. Gloria built the film around a 50Hz tone, a frequency low enough that you feel it in your gut before you consciously hear it. As Maia’s bond with the natural world deepens, the pitch climbs, so the soundtrack is quietly charting her transformation underneath the images. In the scene where Teo presses her hand to a tree and tells her to listen to nature with her body rather than her ears, the sound designer cycled through options, including, at one point, a witch’s scream, before the team landed on that rising low frequency.
I like when the sound is making audible what is invisible.
That is a working philosophy, not a soundbite, and it puts Gloria in the company of someone like Walter Murch, who has spent a career arguing that the audience should feel a film’s sound long before it can name it. Most viewers won’t ever consciously register the 50Hz hum. They’ll only notice that the orchard feels alive.
The Gaze, and a Handstand
For the way the film looks at its lead, Gloria pointed to Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire and its charged, studied gaze between two women. She wanted Sarah Short’s Maia to hold the camera with that same uninterrupted intensity, an eye contact that pulls the viewer in rather than letting them off the hook.
Her openness on set produced one of the film’s better moments by accident. In rehearsal she noticed Short could drop into a handstand with ease, read it as the actress’s way of keeping anxiety at bay, and rewrote a scene around it. This is the rare kind of directing that treats a performer’s body as a source of ideas rather than a thing to be blocked. The fear of change is the film’s stated subject. Gloria’s willingness to abandon a planned scene for a better unplanned one is the same instinct, pointed at her own process.
A Story Written on the Skin
Gloria didn’t write Chlorophyll. Marco Borromei, a screenwriter whose credits include the Italian Skam, brought her the idea. She took it because it landed on something personal: the long, uneasy process of accepting herself, told through Maia’s slow shift from human into something rooted and green. The film treats nature not as scenery but as a living counterforce with its own pull, which places it closer to Hayao Miyazaki’s animism than to standard coming-of-age realism. The trees in Chlorophyll want something.
The 75-minute runtime wasn’t a plan either. The script ran longer; the cuts happened in the editing room, where Gloria credits Chiara Dainese with holding the film together while the director spent the first two weeks convinced it wouldn’t work. Gloria has come to prefer the short feature, citing Quentin Dupieux, who routinely lands his films around 65 to 70 minutes. There’s an argument, and Chlorophyll makes it, that a fairy tale shouldn’t overstay its spell.
The Cinema That Closes
The conversation kept circling back to change, and it ended on a loss. The cinema in Gloria’s hometown, open since 1929, is shutting down, its future possibly an Airbnb or a supermarket. She shot a five-minute short there to preserve the space, and maybe to save it. The throughline of the whole talk, the fear of change set against its beauty, hardened here into something with stakes. Marcus name-checked the boarded-up Arclight and the filmmakers who chipped in to keep the Fox in Westwood alive, and Gloria offered the one idea that felt like a way forward: that the theater survives by becoming an event, the screening bundled with the live story of how the film got made.
It’s when people are going because they have another story, which is the story of how the film was made as well with the movie itself.
She is describing the exact value of a festival premiere, or a podcast like this one: the film plus the human account of how it survived. By that measure Chlorophyll is already doing the work twice over, on screen and in the telling. A movie about the terror and the gift of transformation, made by a director who finished it two days before showing it, lost her home the week after, and built its rainstorm out of garden hose. The film isn’t in spite of all that. It’s made of it.
