TIBER grew from my years living and studying in Rome, where I became increasingly drawn to the sense that cities are not silent, and that history is never entirely behind us. Like memory, Rome's past feels alive. Its churches, ruins and sculptures carry the presence of those who made them, and those they once represented: history held in stone, form and space. Love is like this too. It does not simply leave us. Just as buildings, artworks, valleys and rivers bear witness to the past, so do our own minds and bodies. I wanted to make a film in which private grief moves through a world held by art, landscape and time.

At its centre, TIBER is about acceptance and refusal: the struggle to let go, and the difficulty of living in the present when memory remains so vivid. Marco's journey through Rome and Tuscany toward the River Tiber became a way of exploring how grief can exist alongside beauty, tenderness, ritual and even moments of lightness. This is part of what moves me so deeply about baroque sculpture. Early in the film we encounter Bernini's Ecstasy of St Teresa: a figure suspended between bliss and anguish, frozen in marble yet alive in a way that is difficult to explain. I am drawn to that contradiction, to the way art can make stillness feel animated, and the past feel present. Just as Bernini's sculpture can still evoke ecstasy centuries later, memory can continue to stir feeling long after a moment has passed. I wanted to celebrate these experiences: the encounter with a statue hundreds of years old, the remembered movement of a car on summer roads, the sound of water and cicadas, the warmth between a father and daughter, and the persistence of memory within ordinary life.

As an art historian, Marco lives among works that hold agony and transcendence in the same frame. That tension shaped the film both formally and emotionally. At the centre of that world is the Tiber itself: a river that has witnessed the founding of Rome, every empire and ruin since, and countless lives lived along its banks. It witnesses us now. There is something clarifying about a river that has seen everything and continues to move. Rather than offering catharsis or resolution, the film stays with grief as it passes through a world where history endures, beauty remains, and love, even when broken, can still be carried forward.