MASBEDO and The Complex Nature of Arsa

“No man is an island,” John Donne famously wrote. But what if an island were a girl? That’s the provocative premise of Arsa, an Italian-language drama set on the volcanic island of Stromboli, where an enigmatic 18-year-old lives alone until three young tourists invade her isolated world. The artistic duo of Iacopo Bedogni and Nicolò Massazza, known collectively as MASBEDO, is known for work that spans visual art, performance and cinema and has been exhibited at major museums and international institutions, and with Arsa, they make the move to feature filmmaking.

“The transition was quite natural because we come from an experience based on visual arts where the storytelling component was very, very present,” Bedogni says. “But the big leap was moving from a storytelling that was basically heavily reliant on images to working with a scriptwriter in a collaborative, flexible way to create a much more complex and literary kind of storytelling.” Arsa (newcomer Gala Zohar Martinucci) is an 18-year-old girl, living in isolation on Stromboli, where she grieves the death of her father.

Arsa’s world is disrupted by the arrival of three tourists, including Andrea (Jacopo Olmo Antinori, Me & You), who becomes fascinated by Arsa and tries to make a connection with her. For Bedogni and Massazza, however, Arsa was never simply a matter of transferring their visual-art practice to cinema. The island of Stromboli was central from the beginning. “The wild, powerful nature of Stromboli is one of the main actors in this movie,” Bedogni says. “For us, Stromboli is not just a place, but also a kind of open-air studio.”

The connection is deeply personal. The duo has been visiting Stromboli for more than three decades and has created numerous works there. That history informed their decision to make the island almost a character in Arsa, one whose moods and mysteries resist easy explanation. “From the start we conceived this character as a mysterious character just like Stromboli’s nature,” Massazza says of Arsa. He describes an island that can be silent and still before suddenly revealing something more primitive and volatile.

The same principle shaped their heroine. Rather than explaining Arsa completely, the filmmakers wanted audiences to inhabit her mystery. “We wanted to work on a more unconscious part or subconscious part where the viewer finds themselves immersed in these images,” Massazza explains. “They need to work and do some uncomfortable kind of work.” That ambiguity is deliberate. Rather than prescribing an interpretation, Arsa asks viewers to construct their own. Massazza describes the process as a kind of “second editing,” in which the images continue to change and acquire meaning inside the viewer after the film has ended.

The film is also concerned with inheritance, grief and the psychological traces parents leave behind. Bedogni sees those themes as particularly significant to the duo because they are both artists and fathers. “Arsa receives a legacy from her father which is not the sort of standard patriarchal kind of legacy,” Begdoni says. Her father is instead a damaged, vulnerable figure who passes on “a degree of fragility.” That inheritance becomes part of Arsa’s identity, just as the wounds and absences left by parents can become ideas or obsessions that shape the way their children understand the world.

The filmmakers found their Arsa in Martinucci, whose lack of extensive acting experience ultimately became part of what attracted them to her. Their producer had shown them a short film in which she appeared, and she subsequently emerged from an intense casting process.

“We immediately felt that her personality was like the volcanic personality of the island,” Massazza says. She possessed an unusual combination of strength and silence, along with the confidence to hold the camera’s attention. Most importantly, the filmmakers wanted someone who did not merely portray Arsa but seemed to belong to Stromboli itself. “We wanted an actor who could be part of the island just like a stone is or a piece of a root is or a lava itself,” Massazza says. “She needed to become a component of the island, and we believe that she pulled it off perfectly.” That identification between woman and landscape extends to the film’s three young visitors. The tourists are not simply outsiders who arrive to advance the plot; they represent the audience’s own relationship with Stromboli.

“Arsa is the island itself, and the tourists metaphorically represent all of us,” Bedogni says. They arrive briefly at a place that is isolated, difficult and mysterious, attempting to understand it while simultaneously remaining outsiders. Their presence reflects the paradox of tourism: being irresistibly drawn to a place precisely because of its otherness while never truly penetrating its secrets. “You can never get to the bottom of it,” Bedogni says of Stromboli. “You can never fully grasp such a profound place.” In that sense, Arsa becomes more than a story about a young woman and the strangers who enter her life. It is a meditation on the limits of understanding — of people, places and even ourselves.

For MASBEDO, cinema provides another way of exploring that uncertainty. Rather than resolving the mysteries surrounding Arsa, Stromboli or the characters who arrive on its shores, Arsa leaves them to linger, like the volcanic landscape itself: beautiful, dangerous, enigmatic and never entirely still.

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