Villasimius: The Marina Festival fills the port with three film stars.

"I act to experience emotions and share them with the audience," Valerio Mastandrea explained his work as an actor and director to the audience that packed the stage at the Villasimius Marina Festival on Saturday night.

The more than 400 chairs weren't enough for the crowd that flocked to the port square from sunset. Aside from them, some sat on the benches along the waterfront, others on chairs brought from home, and many others stood, all followed the enthralled discussion between the Roman artist and his colleagues and friends Valeria Golino and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi.

"Like Valerio, I'm a street actress, a stray, who trained on set and not in acting schools," Golino said immediately after explaining her relationship with Goliarda Sapienza, another stray (perhaps) but with different roots.

Golino owes not only the novel that allowed her to establish herself as a director among the general public with the television adaptation of the novel, but also a fundamental relationship with the author of “The Art of Joy,” which she developed during her youth.

“I was 18 and I went to her to improve my diction,” Golino said. “Her ex-husband, director Citto Maselli, sent me there, with whom I later shot ‘Storia d'amore’.”

It was an intense relationship that, at the time, a young woman could not have imagined how crucial it would become. And the dialogue offered many moments of reflection on the close connection between literature and cinema. It was no coincidence that in the front row, listening raptly, were Stefano Petrocchi, patron of the Strega Prize, and poet Stefano Dal Bianco (winner of the 2024 Strega Poetry Prize). This evening, they will take the baton on stage in Villasimius alongside writer Andrea Bajani, the recent champion of Italy's most important literary competition.

A magnetic Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's background is different. "I act to experience the vertigo of shame," she confessed, explaining her role. It's about going beyond oneself, pushing one's comfort zone and letting oneself be carried away by feelings or reactions that are sometimes uncontrollable, like the time she burst out laughing during a dramatic scene. She thought she'd made a mistake, but the director deemed her reaction perfect.

Prompted by Francesca Serafini (an experienced screenwriter and novelist, wisely chosen as artistic director by the festival's creator, Luigi Ferrara), the three great artists filled the meeting with amusing anecdotes from their careers, highlighting their great complicity.

But the evening didn't end when Golino, Mastandrea, and Bruni Tedeschi left the stage around 11 p.m. Generously, none of them shied away from photos and autographs with the audience, demonstrating that their simplicity and empathy weren't just for the stage, but are part of their lives.