He paused. Lit a cigarette, hesitating like someone who fears he isn’t believed. So that’s how my trials were filmed from that point on, he continued, with the camera empty, and the sentences were always quite lenient. Of that short documentary, not even a half hour long, which he’d actually filmed and which remains buried in the archives of a defunct state, all the rest — at least a couple more hours of filming, I mean all the images filmed without celluloid — is the most moving, but those images live only in the archive of my memory and at a certain point it almost seemed to me I was seeing them projected on the screen of this clear night in May. He stopped talking, and I was to understand he had nothing else to add, raised his glass in a toast to something only he knew, and then said: now you get why I didn’t put screenwriter down in my bio, but this isn’t important, the funniest thing in this whole story is the line I used to convince him to come and film without celluloid: Director, we’re dealing with reality here, not film. Just think a moment about that bit of nonsense: we’re dealing with reality here, not film. Now that he’s no longer with us and this festival is showing a retrospective of all his movies, except the most important one, the one that’s not on celluloid, a desire has come over me and I don’t know if it’s nostalgia or regret: I wish that through some sorcery he’d pop out of the night, if only for an instant, to laugh with me at that line of mine.