Mobbing

When work gets too much

In Mobbing, Italian DP Luca Bigazzi has tackled the difficult theme of oppression by employers in the workplace. It is based on a true story.

Respected award-winning Italian Director of Photography Luca Bigazzi (Lamerica; Bread and Tulips; The Way They Laughed) likes new challenges. He avoids well-trodden paths and discarded ideas. So he alternates shooting top line features with more experimental projects. Like this job, Mobbing, directed by Francesca Comencini, and shot in Super 16.

The film is about anti-social tactics, often initiated by employers in order to force employees to leave jobs. They marginalize workers by given them unsuitable duties and harassing them into making errors. Based on a true story, Mobbing is about a middle-level female employee, played by well-known actress Nicoletta Braschi. Her employer gives her secondary duties which she cannot manage. But she cannot resign; her family relies on her earnings. The tragic result is psychological disease and isolation in the workplace.

"That is my political motivation," said Luca, "then there is my personal motivation; a wish for simplicity and subtlety. To get it, we shot everything with hand-held cameras, helped only by one camera assistant and one electrician. No generator; we used household electric points and small fluorescent lights. We filmed in natural surroundings, mostly using natural light, trying to match the technical ‘subtleties’ without allowing the picture to become careless or colourless.