Coming from tonight for three prime time Monday evenings on Rai1 the fiction Living is not a child’s game the story of how drugs can upset the lives of parents and children. We met authors and protagonists.
“Not a series of complaints, but a description of reality”. This is how its creator and screenwriter defines it, Fabio Boniface, Living is not child’s play, from tonight 15 May in three prime time every Monday on Rai1. A family drama, as they define it in those parts, which tells of a group of boys and their parents. A work of years that deals with a theme “very delicate for the public service, especially for a prime time on the flagship network”: drugs.
As he declared when meeting the press Boniface (Chocolate Lessons, Put Grandma in the Freezer),”drugs are buying happiness for 20 euros and it’s nice too, it must be said. Then we also tell everything else, the damage it causes, not only physical but to one’s emotional life. It is not the right path and we say it very clearly”. To quote a professor in the series, “the opposite of drugs is the truth”. A central theme of this story, directed by Rolando Ravello, is precisely the impossibility of escaping from oneself. “Drugs are the most visible theme, perceived today as a form of entertainment, far from the addicts who shot up in the past decades. It’s more daily, it’s more scary. But it is also a pretext to tell how we cannot escape from ourselves, how a pebble becomes an avalanche, an innocent gesture like offering a pill to a friend can then involve everyone: parents, police, children, school, neighborhood criminals, all fueled by adolescence, which is like a runaway horse. History drops the masks of many protagonists, with their existential problems inside”.
Living is not a child’s play tells the world of adults and at the same time that of young people. “Being a parent isn’t that simple either,” adds the screenwriter, “the old model of parental authority is over, but a new one is needed. It seems to me that guilt is an even more universal feeling of love and friendship. To get to know them better, I spent time in a high school with many kids and talked to them a lot.”
An attempt to tell Italian families without clichés or rhetoric, this is how the director describes the series, Roland Ravello. “We didn’t want to teach anyone anything, we faced a problem trying to reflect on what is happening to our children. I think family is the most important thing, as a boy my dream was to be an actor today I would say keep my family together. The kids experience difficult situations, created by us and by our parents. Needless to pretend, we seek dialogue. Drugs are widespread and very cheap, let’s not put our heads in the sand, but let’s face the issue. Our children live alone and feel without support, they don’t even have the ideals that were important to us. If I read that they camp in front of universities, I enjoy it, because they live”.
The main character is Stephen Fresia father in financial difficulty, who is not paid for an important job and enters a crisis together with his wife, played by Nicole Grimaudo. “They are a close-knit family,” Fresi said, “but when a striking event happens, the balance can be lost in an instant, if a non-economic but unknown problem intervenes, such as drugs, which you never thought could involve your child . Then you lose touch with reality, even within the couple. My character feels like the head of the family, he wants to solve the situation himself, instead of listening to solve the problem together. We need to recover the dialogue with the children. It is truly a very choral miniseries, which follows all points of view ”.
Nicole Grimaudo he recalls how he immediately felt immediate empathy for this mother and wife. “They are not characters, but people. I felt immediate closeness with the mother but also with her daughter. I have two little girls and it’s a topic I frequent on a daily basis, already harboring fears for what will await them. At stake is the future of our children”.