Joystick: The Short Film of a Generation Trying to Reclaim Its Teenage Years

There’s a piece of adolescence that one generation never got: heading out without knowing exactly where you’re going, spending whole afternoons with friends, meeting new people and falling in love, fighting, but also being bored. Doing something stupid and maybe regretting it the next day. Wasting time, making mistakes and discovering yourself while you discover the world.

For anyone just past twenty today, a big part of adolescence coincided with COVID. At the very moment in life when the world should have suddenly opened up, it shrank to the walls of home. School became a screen, friends became windows on a video call, relationships something to keep at a distance.

None of this came without consequences. Surveys carried out in the years after the pandemic recorded effects among teenagers on mental health, on confidence in the future and on the quality of their relationships. But telling the story of this generation only through isolation risks giving an incomplete picture. Because young people still want to be together, go out, create, experiment. And in its own small way, that’s what “Joystick” shows too: an independent short film made this summer by Paolo Baldassarre Macrillò together with a group of under-22s from Florence and Modena. Some come from film schools and acting classes, others study communications or computer engineering, and others still are friends who simply decided to show up and lend a hand. Different backgrounds and skills brought together to turn an idea into a real project, with no big production behind it and practically no budget.

Among them is Maria Fernanda Jauregui Vizcarra, a student of Scienze Umanistiche per la Comunicazione (humanities and communication) in Florence, who handled the project’s organization and helped write the screenplay. Filming took place in mid-July in the countryside around Vignola, a town near Modena.

The story of Joystick revolves around two characters and two opposite ways of looking for balance. Gioele seems to have everything under control, while Lei (Italian for “her”: her name is deliberately kept a mystery) has taken refuge in order and routine, building a space where she can feel safe. Two different forms of self-defense: some people build their cage inside their head while keeping up a strong front for the outside world, and others make that cage real and choose to lock themselves in.

Behind this story, inevitably, lies the experience of those who lived through the pandemic years right when they should have been starting to leave home, test their independence and build their own relationships. Joystick starts from that absence and tries to flip it into a question: what if, to find balance, you had to lose control, at least once?

It’s a question about the film’s characters, but it seems to speak about the young people who made it, too. Because to shoot Joystick they had to do exactly what, for a stretch of their adolescence, they couldn’t: leave the house, meet up, argue, travel, get organized, split up the work, solve problems, improvise and build something together.

The project is now in post-production, and the group is working on distribution, looking for partnerships with local organizations and sponsors and choosing the festivals and competitions to submit the film to. A series of screenings is also planned across Florence, Modena and Bologna, and later Joystick will be released online on the director’s YouTube channel and the project’s social accounts.

The first date is in Florence: Friday, September 25, from 6:30 p.m., at CPA Firenze Sud, with an evening that opens with an apericena (a buffet-style aperitivo that doubles as dinner) and continues with the screening of the short film and a brief talk with the young people who made it.

Two founders, zero budget, one summer and a short film to shoot. Maybe Joystick says something more about this generation: their need to get back to doing things together, meeting up, trying, getting it wrong and building something without necessarily waiting for someone to give them permission.

But it also shows what can happen next: when you start going out again, meeting up, taking a chance on something together. When you even accept losing control a little to find a new balance. And when that screen, once a place to stay shut in, finally becomes a surface on which to project something we’ve made together.

In that sense, it’s a project that also tells the story of another Florence. Not the Florence of big productions, cultural institutions or established events, but the one that moves under the radar: students, young creatives, aspiring directors and actors, people with completely different skills who meet and decide to try to build something.