In collaboration with Siciliano Contemporary Ballet, Tale of Love is an allegory of toxic love. On a transcendental level, the film wants to grasp the psychological violence within an unstable and unbalanced love story. Trapped souls, poised between attraction and repulsion, unrequited obsessions and self-defence mechanisms. Tale of Love is like a recurring dream. It is the struggle between opposite but complementary forces. Characters never meet, yet they continue to relate to each other.
Marica De Michele (Locorotondo, Apulia, 02/09/86) is an Italian freelance filmmaker, editor and set designer based in the Netherlands. She approached for the first time photography, video making and editing during an exchange study program in Visual Arts at Sabanci Universiteti in Istanbul. After she obtained her BA in Set Design from Academy of Fine Arts of Rome, she started working as an assistant scenographer for independent theatre companies, but she also kept experimenting on her own with photography and video-editing. In 2011 she attended a Photography Reportage Class by Dario De Dominicis in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Thanks to her multi-disciplinary approach, in 2018 she obtained another BA in Man & Communication from Design Academy Eindhoven. Trough these years of study, constant search and research, new experimentations and never-ending personal reflections, Marica slowly realised her devotion for the audiovisual. During her internship period in New York, while assisting the absurdist photographer Alison Brady and the activist poet and performer Jamie Olowale Kosoko, Marica proclaimed film as her main medium. Since then, by maintaining the same self-taught approach, her movie production has grown exponentially. Currently, while developing her own artistic voice, Marica mostly collaborates with artists, performers, designers and musicians.
Director Statement
Who has never fallen in love with the wrong person, or with somebody who simply doesn’t reciprocate the same feelings? Sometimes these encounters become unbalanced relationships that over time produce inevitably ‘toxic’ dynamics from which it can be very difficult to get out. How to heal and deal with it?
