Where it was filmed 'Ten Minutes'

At times it takes very little to start again: ten minutes can change a whole day. Ten minutes of doing something completely new can change the path of a life. This is what Bianca (Barbara Ronchi) discovers in the midst of an existential crisis that causes her to be hospitalized at Policlinico Umberto I in Rome. Those ten minutes will take her to meet new people, to discover special relationships and the attention of those who have always loved her. Anything can happen in those ten minutes, even the funeral of an unknown person, in piazza San Francesco d’Assisi in Trastevere, where the Church of San Francesco a Ripa stands.

Freely inspired by Chiara Gamberale’s novel Per dieci minuti, the film, directed by Maria Sole Tognazzi, and written by her with Francesca Archibugi, was shot in six weeks, mostly in Rome. Bianca has always lived with her husband Nic (Alessandro Tedeschi) in an apartment in the neighbourhood of Quarticciolo, a “no place” with some shops, such as the hairdressing salon recreated in via Castellaneta.

Locations also included Naples and Palermo. After a session with her therapist (Margherita Buy) on the banks of the lake in Trevignano Romano, Bianca decides to drive (a fear she needs to overcome) to her parents in Sicily. She later drives along the shorefront of Naples (with the obligatory shot of Castel dell’Ovo) and from there boards a ferry for Palermo. Her parents live in piazza San Giacomo La Marina, at n. 2, next to the Church of Santa Maria la Nova. Bianca watches her mother (Anna Ferruzzo) grocery shopping at the Vucciria market, before she makes her presence known and talks to her. The most important ten minutes of her therapy are those spent in her company, in a bar looking onto the Cathedral, and end with a hug in the evocative courtyard of the Monastery of Saint Catherine of Alexandria. The film opens and closes on the beach of Arenella.