Lena (english translation)

By Giacomo Banchelli

Feature film set in the city of Bologna, Italy. Lena is a teenage, dreamer and visionary girl who does not get on well with the world and many people around her, like her mother. She lives borderline experiences with her friends, at school she suffers the violence of a gang of girls (and she will take revenge), she falls in love with a mysterious boy with suicidal thoughts and she loves her grandfather expert on esotericism and the Tarots to see inside the soul and time. After the violence, pain, loss, revenge and to have been lost in an enormous cemetery at night, she discovers that the journey of life is actually full of pleasure, growth, forgiveness and love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Giacomo Banchelli
• Release date: Jan 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9788890667855

Giacomo Banchelli

Ho sempre avuto la passione per i romanzi, i racconti, le sceneggiature, la fotografia e il cinema. Mi piace l’arte in tutti i sensi e adoro inventare sempre cose nuove. ***** My passion has always been novels, short stories, screenplays, photography and cinema. I like every kind of art and I love to create new things every time.

Book preview

Giacomo Banchelli

LENA

Smashwords Edition

License Notes

Screenplay - English Translation

Copyright 2012 Giacomo Banchelli

ISBN 978-88-906678-5-5

Available in paper copy on

www.lulu.com/spotlight/GiacomoBanchelli

Translation

Francesca Forlani

Cover: Lyubimtseva Anna

Girl with blue eyes.

Shutterstock

This book is protected under copyright laws.

Any reproduction, event partial, is prohibited.

Many thanks to all the people who, in any way, have contributed to the creation of this text.

INDEX

Characters

Notes

Screenplay

Synopsis

CHARACTERS

Lena

16 years old. She's a slim and pale girl, she puts dark make up on and always wears black, but she’s not really a dark. She has a nice body, but her clothes are always too big and hide it. She has light blue eyes, a few piercings on her face, her hair is turnip top red because of a dye gone wrong. She has some scares on her arms that go back to the days she used to self harm when she was younger, in Sara’s company. She attends high school and always goes around with a red heart shaped bag with black straps on. She's a dreamer but she can be pretty pragmatic if there is the need for it and she knows how to use her hands in a furious way too. She has a controversial relationship with her mother, who’s divorced from her father and who's never around. She doesn't smoke cigarettes, only a joint from time to time. She doesn't take drugs but in compensation she likes to drink alcohol.

Lena’s grandfather

He's a pattern of wisdom and culture. He's Lena's dad's father, and Lena is closer to him than what she is to her mother. He's a sort of magician and speaks about everything with smoothness. When he was young, he used to be a philanderer and used to dance well. He's always lived in the same house he was born in. He knows how to use Tarots and is interested in occultism, secret history, UFO etcetera. He's a widower. At home he has a library well supplied with books about these mysterious subjects. When he talks with Lena, he always sips some hot malt drink resembling coffee, each time from the same cup. He has a certain sensitivity. He doesn't get along with Lena's mother, since after she divorced. He has a few heart problems and in fact he dies because of them.

Marco

A high school boy whom Lena falls in love with. He has many existential problems, he can't find his own place in the world, he feels an overwhelming emptiness inside of him and this sense of loss and nihilism induce him to commit suicide in the end. He is always on his own, doesn't have friends, he never speaks to anyone apart from Lena. His face is always sad. He wears dark clothes.

Sara

16 years old. She's Lena's best friend. She attends the same high school as Lena but in a different class. She dresses casual and sporty, she's not a dark. She doesn't like her body, she has some scars on her arms, cuts she has done herself while being with Lena, in addition she has red folds of both her elbows because of drug injections. When she was a little girl, she had seen her mother shoot herself in the head on a snowy day in the garden of the house, this memory tortures her and the guilt feelings cause her depressive crisis that she faces by consuming an increasing amount of drugs. To collect the money she doesn't hesitate to sell her body. For the same reasons she has self harming instincts. She has dealer friends who supply her at every occasion. She always brings with her a picture of her dead mother. She becomes a drug addict but she's willing to get out of it with Lena's help.

Catherina

Leader of a female gang who are violent and go around armed with knives. She always brings a butterfly knife with her and knows how to handle it well. She's not a dark. She's a repressed lesbian who works off her rage by using violence on other girls.

Lena's mother

She's an unhappy woman that after the divorce has become aggressive and stressing with Lena, she can't wait to criticize her and doesn't get along with her. She’s always dressed in dark brown clothes. She considers Lena’s grandfather a slob who has put in Lena's head lots of mystic esoteric foolishness. Even though she also knew how to use Tarots and had given her deck to granddad before leaving them and not to commit herself too much. She is at least about Lena's height.

Marika

One of Elena's classmates. She's a bit of a dark.

Lorena, Simona, Daniela

Catherina's three petite friends. Daniela is the one who films all of their evil deeds with her cell phone.

Elena

One of Lena's friends. Attends the same high school as Lena but in a different class. She is of age and drives a car. She's not a dark.

NOTES

(1)-All of this scene of Sara can be split and switched with the one where Lena and Marco make love.

(2)-The scene can be spaced out with Decadence sequences and until she tries to commit suicide. It can even be an animation.

The heart shaped bag is large but it has little thickness, it’s bright luminous red, it’s made of a stuffed and soft material with a long black strap to sling it over the shoulder. It is closed by a zip. Lena wears it always over her shoulder laid against her hip. During the horizontal filming of her walking alone filmed from her side, the bag is always between her and movie camera. The heart shaped bag symbolizes her own heart that is why it is used in a different way depending on her mood. In some scenes it is simply said that the heart shaped bag is not there, which could mean that Lena doesn’t have the bag with her, or that Lena has the bag with her but it’s not framed and so in this particular scene it does not appear. If nothing about the bag is specified it means that the bag is not there.

When a subtitle with IMAGINATION appears, it means that dreamlike scenes bred by one of the characters appear, if they’re good or negative it depends on its mood and they can be attached to the situation he’s going through or not. Before a dreamlike scene starts. there is an approach of the movie camera to the eyes of the character that pictures it.

For clearness matters the term bathroom and lavatory are used in a differentiate way: with bathroom it is meant the totality of the lavatories of the wall urinals and of the washbasins (especially during the shootings that take place inside of Decadence and the School), instead the lavatory is only meant to be a small space enclosed in between three walls and a door which contains just a toilet seat and a Turkish bath.

V.O. means voice over: you hear the voice of the character but he is not really talking.

Giacomo Banchelli

LENA

INSIDE BUS - DAY

On the bus along the streets of Bologna, no one speaks to anybody. Lena is sitting close to the bus’s central doors. She has the heart shaped bag on her legs. She leans her chin on her closed fist and looks at the city from the window. Her bare forearms reveal some of her scares. The window next to her has a wide and very clear crack, though it is intact.

LENA (V.O.)

I'm sixteen years old, sometimes I look behind a window at the world going by fast and I don't know what I'm feeling. Maybe because I prefer walking slowly, I don't like to go fast, it prevents me from feeling things, it prevents me from feeling people. I don't want others to become for me what they have become for my mother: habits, numbers, annoyances, or dangers. I don't want to become an adult lost in the world and lost inside of himself.

***

LENA'S IMAGINATION

While Lena is thinking, speed up scenes of the urban chaos of Bologna appear, made of lots of cars that run fast along the roads; people who walk fast without looking at each other nor communicate; people who go in and come out from shops and shopping centers with bags in their hands. Some of those scenes, not all of them, are shuffled with others of flying birds on the Reno river.

***

INSIDE BUS - DAY

Lena looks at the passengers who do not