Rosa Karo: The Italian Key

By Briege McGarrity

Rosa Karo is creative, idealistic, ambitious, and knows exactly the kind of empowering film project to concentrate her energies on. Rosa wrote and directed The Italian Key, an enjoyable romantic film – kind of nostalgic period piece that shows audiences the beauty of life. While the demographic may be predictable, the premise and its many themes and storylines give the film a distinctly European style.

Mostly shot on location in beautiful Val Borbera region of Italy, the film tells the story of Cabella, a 19-year-old orphan played convincingly by up-and-coming French-Irish actress Gwendolyn Anslow.  Following the death of her non-related uncle Max, his upper-class relatives claim everything leaving Cabella sad and destitute. Then she gets a secret key left to her by Max and begins her journey of self-discovery to a villa in Italy.

Something of a sleeper hit, The Italian Key enjoyed a six month release in Finland as well as screenings at several festivals. Not surprisingly, it has garnered a slew of awards including, Best Feel Good Film at the Feel Good Film Festival; Aloha Award at the Honolulu Film Awards; The Silver Ace Award at the Las Vegas Film Festival; Best Foreign Film at the Prince Edward Island International Film Festival and the Women Behind the Camera Award at the Tulsa Film Festival.

IFQ’s Briege McGarrity enjoyed a brief chat with Rosa before she sets off on a business trip to Europe.

IFQ: Rosa congratulations on the success of your film The Italian Key. Tell me more about how the project got it to the big screen.

Rosa Karo (RK): Thanks, Briege! We were very happy to screen at the Independent Film Quarterly Festival at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood! You know the saying ‘it takes a village’ to do something – well, in The Italian Key’s case this was literally true. We have been summer residents of the small Cabella village in Val Borbera, Italy, for years, and made this movie as a community project with the locals. We did everything very ‘family-style’, living and eating together for a couple of months with the whole cast and crew hanging out to work and play together. My husband Tuomas Kantelinen was one of the producers and composed the music for the movie, my father was another producer, and all our filmmaker friends rallied to work on the film for shorter or longer periods of time.

IFQ: You seem to have nailed the one thing that beleaguers some filmmakers, that being, making a film that audiences are attracted to. What challenges did you encounter with The Italian Key?

RK: From the get-go, we knew that we wanted to make a sweet and romantic film with a very happy ending. The film was originally thought to be for girls and young women 12-16, but we learned quickly that female audiences of all ages really enjoyed The Italian Key, as well as some romantic men… [Smiles.]

Life nowadays is so hectic, everyone is so busy and on the edge, and even independent movies are often overtly dark and edgy. I respect everyone who makes indie movies, but didn’t want to add to this trend, but instead make something genuinely feel-good that also has the leisurely, enjoyable pace of life in an Italian small village.

One of the foremost challenges is, of course, finding funds to make any movie, and especially a movie that doesn’t have big name movie stars in it. We financed some of it ourselves, some from local film commissions such as the Torino-Piemonte and Liguria Film Commissions, and were also given a generous subsidy by the Finnish Film Foundation.

IFQ: It’s somewhat European the way all the mysterious threads in your film are inter-connected; there’s a lot going on in the film. Were you happy with the script-to-screen transformation?

RK: There is a lot of story there, and now when I watch it again, I find myself giggling at the many twists and turns, flashbacks and narratives the film meanders through while coming to its grand finale of a happy ending for every character! Which by the way is not that European, or at least it’s unheard of in our native Finland, where most movies tell sad stories about WWII in which we at least kill off every other character, if not all…

I personally am so sad when an important character in a movie dies, so this is probably my dream movie… While it’s all mysterious and sometimes heart-breaking, you somehow know that all will be well at the very end. As an independent writer and director your work is all about compromise, so the end product is never exactly what you imagined when writing, but I am happy about the way the film turned out, not only as an end product but also as a beautiful and very collective creative process that involved about a hundred people, many of them young volunteers who gave one summer to make the film…

IFQ: Are you surprised by all the awards and success on the international festival circuit?

RK: We didn’t have any expectations as this was my first feature fiction film – and sometimes we had to be quite resourceful and spontaneous, shooting in another location or casting someone last minute as the schedule was changing and all the variables of weather, time, availability etc. were in motion. We also thought this movie was for people who still appreciate beauty, poetry, love, friendship – kind of old-school values when it comes to most indie movies. So we were unsure whether we could get to festivals, and were very happy when we got picked for so many, and started winning awards.

Especially audience awards are of course important to us as filmmakers, it means someone out there really liked what we tried to tell them, and it’s such an inspiration to move onto the next project knowing that there are people out there who want to see these kinds of films, too.

IFQ: As your production value was high, how was it financing and shooting those beautiful settings and sets?

RK: We shot in such a beautiful and mostly unknown part of Italy where we had no shortage of breathtaking mountain scenery, all of it naturally free for us to use. The only problem would sometimes be getting all our gear, cast and crew to that location.

We had a great production designer, Stefano Maria Ortolani (Letters to Juliet, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Gangs of New York, etc) who helped create the look of Cabella’s abandoned house, Lord Jai’s Castle etc. but those were all naturally existing places that we just modified a little bit for shooting.

The movie wasn’t that expensive to shoot, but it does look ‘bigger’ than its budget because all the money is on-screen. Our DP’s Gianni Giannelli and Ville Tanttu very meticulously color-graded the film in post, which added to the lush production design. We wanted a very ‘timeless’ look for the movie. It’s not any period really, but there aren’t that many very modern elements in the frame – even cars are old Fiat 500’s and other vintage models. You certainly won’t see a cell phone or computer in The Italian Key’s world!

IFQ: Your casting was spot on especially lead actress, Gwendolyn Anslow. How did you find the cast?

RK: All the young protagonists are cast locally from summer residents. Luckily there is a great little theater company, the Theater of Eternal Values, in Val Borbera, so a lot of the cast came through them.

We ended up with a very colorful and international cast – Gwendolyn Anslow (Cabella) is half Irish, half French; the three real-life sisters Joana, Elisa and Isadora Cartocci (who played the film’s sisters Maria, Sophia and Giulia) are half-Brazilian, half-Italian; Leo Vertunni (Leo) is half-British, half-Italian; Moose Ali Khan (Lord Jai) is Indian, but grew up in the UK; Andreas Wilson and Richard Ulfsäter (young Max and Alexander) are Swedes; Mikko Leppilampi (Mr. Fabian) is from Finland, and Biagio Musacchia (Romeo) is half-Finnish, half-Italian-American; and John Shea (Alexander), Peter Almond (Bronzini), Joeanne Sayler (Chiara) are Americans.

With both our crew and the cast we followed the philosophy of ‘going with the flow’ – we needed someone and somehow a suitable candidate just popped up, we were very lucky that way!

IFQ: Have you visited any of the film markets looking for distribution?

RK: The film was theatrically released in Scandinavian territories. It played in cinemas in Finland for almost 6 months, in about 12 cities and towns. Audiences were mostly female, a lot of girlfriends coming to see the movie together, mother-daughter and, grandmother-granddaughter combos etc.

We did have a sales agent for European territories and they did sell the movie to some European countries. We ended up holding the rights to US and Canada – we still haven’t done anything about it, but will probably just make the movie available on iTunes and possibly other VOD platforms.

We were approached by quite many small distributors and ‘producer’s reps,’ but in the end we didn’t click with anyone and didn’t feel safe putting our movie and a slate that had all horror, thriller or the ‘Naked Nuns with Machine Guns’ type of movies… [Smiles.]

IFQ: [Laughs.] Funny – you’re right to take your time and choose the best deal for the film. So apart from love stories, which genre are you most comfortable with?

RK: I love romantic stories, fantasies, I love YA books and would love to work on that kind of supernatural romance stuff one day, as well as dramas with large ensemble casts, period movies, why not even a cool sci-fi premise – but to me it’s important that the film would have some sort of hope for the future and humanity, I don’t like very bleak or harsh endings.

IFQ: Any other projects coming up?

RK: I have three scripts that we are developing right now. Probably the first one I will shoot is an indie drama called Stick Figures, after that a movie that happens in India, and then possibly a bigger action-adventure fantasy, if we can raise a multi-million dollar budget. It will still be inexpensive, but can’t quite be made with a similar approach than The Italian Key and these other dramas.

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