TIBER grew from my years living and studying in Rome, where I became increasingly drawn to the sense that the city, all cities, are not silent. And history, and our past, are not just behind us. Like my memories, Rome's history is alive. Its churches, ruins and sculptures carry the presence of those who made them, and those who they represented, history stuck in stone, form and space. Love is like this. It never leaves us. And just as those buildings, artworks, valleys and rivers bear witness to the past, so do our memories. I wanted to make a film in which a private grief moves through this world, held not only by memory, but by art, landscape and time.

At its centre, TIBER is about acceptance, and refusal. It's about the struggle to let go, and the impossibility of now. Marco's journey through Rome, Tuscany and toward the River Tiber became a way of exploring how grief can exist alongside beauty, tenderness, ritual and even moments of lightness. This is what baroque sculpture does. In the first scene we see Bernini's epic Ecstasy of St. Teresa - a nun, shocked in half bliss, half horror, frozen solid in marble, but so alive. I am deeply moved by this contradiction, by the way that the nature around us, and the nature within, refuse to yield to this nowness, to this static sensing of time. Memory and art do not abide time. Just as Bernini's sculpture can evoke human bliss, even though it's stone, so can the past in our minds and hearts evoke feelings, even though they are gone. I wanted to celebrate these experiences: staring at a statue from 600 years ago one day, before the memory of movement of a car through summer roads, the sound of water and cicadas, the warmth between a father and daughter, and the strange persistence of memory within ordinary life, another. The exhilarating now of memory, and the exhilarating now of art centuries old.

As an art historian, Marco lives among works that hold agony and transcendence in the same frame. That tension shaped the film formally and emotionally. I wanted to make a film in which a private grief moves through this world, held not only by memory, but by art, landscape and time. And at the centre of that world, the Tiber. It witnessed the founding of Rome, every empire and ruin since, every life lived along its banks. It witnesses us now. There is something clarifying about a river that has seen everything and keeps moving and rather than offering resolution, the film accompanies grief through memories of bliss, in this world where history endures, beauty remains, and love, even when broken, can still be carried forward.

This is not a film about catharsis, it's a film about acceptance. And that is a mighty force indeed.