Alessandro Comodin, born in 1982 in the Italian town of Frioul, on the border with Slovenia, first studied literature and only later cinema, in Brussels, at the well-known INSAS school. This borderline and transdisciplinary position is evident in his work, where eclecticism meets a desire for universality and recognition. For his first feature, L'estate di Giacomo (2011) – winner of the Golden Leopard for young filmmakers at the Locarno Film Festival – Comodin challenged Portuguese director João Nicolau to edit the film. An affinity was established between the two filmmakers, who have been editing each other's films ever since (without exception). Comodin's ties to Portuguese cinema – and his knowledge of the language – make him a kind of "distant cousin" of Portuguese cinema, and it is possible to find echoes of his cinema in that of some Portuguese directors, particularly Nicolau and Miguel Gomes. If in his first film, the director was already rehearsing the fantastical possibilities hidden in reality, in his second feature, I tempi felici verranno presto (2016) – that premiered at the Critics' Week in Cannes – the fantastic is unequivocally affirmed, with the recovery of rural imagery around legends and mysterious places. These first two films impose him as an auteur, whose marks are recognisable in the rawness and harshness of his camera and the recurrence of portraits of (lost) youth in a forest landscape.  His most recent feature, Gigi La Legge (2022), takes him in a different direction: the "comedy of reality". What looked like an amusing documentary about a picturesque local policeman turns into an improbable burlesque thriller It's therefore not surprising that Alessandro Comodin chose two comedies for his Carte Blanche, where physical humour, eroticism, action and adventure films merge and confuse. Jacques Rozier and Roberto Benigni are some of his references, filmmakers of laughter and wit, authors who know the power of comedy and whom Comodin revisits through his documentary eye. Whether he follows the precepts of a romantic coming-of-age, a ghost film or a crime comedy, in each of his films Comodin draws characters driven by melancholy, disoriented figures in search of a place where they can recognise themselves. Sometimes they find it, sometimes they just imagine it. But isn't that the same thing?