Name: Giovanni Tria
What do you do at Daze: Digital Marketing Specialist
When did you join Daze: March 2022
Why did you choose to work at Daze:
After a year of experience in a communication agency, I grew tired of only handling the end part of a long process of strategy and communication on behalf of other companies. I wanted an opportunity to explore as widely as possible and be included in broader strategic decisions. Daze offered me an unparalleled opportunity to gain new experiences while starting from areas of expertise I was already familiar with (social media and digital advertising), as well as working in an extremely innovative and rapidly growing sector.
About you:
I was born and raised in the province of Bari. At 18, I moved to Bologna to study literature at the university, intending to pursue an academic career. But after my first encounter with it, the world of research didn’t turn out as I expected.
The passion that initially led me to choose literature remained within me: the passion for stories, for telling and listening to them, reading them, watching them.
This is why I decided to move again after completing my bachelor’s degree, this time to Milan, to approach the world of communication. Having attended a semiotics course certainly helped me realise that communication was not so far from the path I had embarked on.
After all, it’s all about telling stories. Or storytelling, if you prefer.
A passion of yours:
Undoubtedly, cinema. Often associated with literature, I firmly believe that it is more closely related to music and visual arts, rather than writing. What truly elevates a film isn’t the story, but the directorial choices, the sound effects, the tone with which the actors pronounce the words, rather than the words themselves.
Cinema – when well-done – is a continuous exercise of encoding and decoding symbols, a fantastic training for those who want to communicate. If it’s true that being able to communicate effectively is crucial to listening skills, carefully watching a film is, for me, the highest form of listening.
Truth be told, after the pandemic, I struggled a bit to get back into the habit of going back to the theatre, as well as for many other little things that I stopped doing because of COVID. Then Villeneuve’s Dune came out. Having loved Blade Runner 2049 (from the same director) and generally being a science fiction enthusiast, I couldn’t miss it. So, without thinking twice, I ditched a friend and rushed to watch it in the first cinema I found near home.
From that moment, the spark reignited, and I finally returned to watching films in the cinema.
The best film you’ve seen since your “return to the theatre”:
Without a shadow of a doubt: It was “È stata la mano di Dio”, by Paolo Sorrentino.
In general, I appreciate almost all of Sorrentino’s previous works, but at the same time, I’m put off by how over the years, some of his films have become a bit too abstract, laden with overly intricate symbolism to unravel. Probably, the deficiency is only mine, rather than his.
However, in his latest film, I didn’t see yet another intellectual exercise almost “end in itself,” if you pardon the term.
Far from it: anyone who has seen it knows well, this film is an incredible love letter towards his city, cinema, and his family. In a word, towards his roots. During the viewing of the first half of the film, I was doubled over with laughter, only to be emotionally devastated in the rest of the movie. I saw something tangible in it, a type of love that is very difficult to explain in words, but anyone can feel if they reminisce about childhood or stop to look at the vast expanse of the Mediterranean Sea shown at the beginning of the film.
A scene that impressed you:
With Sorrentino, I share Southern Italian origins and, consequently, many impressions and traditions well represented in the film. I understood that “È stata la mano di Dio” also spoke about me, about my roots, in the scene where the explosion of one of the bottles of preserve generates a moment of panic followed by a hearty laugh from all the women present in the kitchen, busy preparing “la salsa”.
The tradition of preparing “la salsa”, or the tomato preserve, was a constant in my childhood. And I remember well the anxiety that my relatives experienced when they brought out the gigantic pot, which was then filled with water and placed over the fire to sterilize the jars full of freshly made sauce. There was a justified apprehension that the younger ones could seriously injure themselves, running near the infamous boiling pot.
The same apprehension you perceive for a moment in the film, when indeed one of the bottles being sterilized explodes.
Those are the details you can perceive, but above all, tell, only if you have experienced them firsthand. In this scene, every barrier between me and Sorrentino fell, the intellectual so distant and hard to understand became the child I once was, running in my aunt’s garden, with my grandmother agitating and yelling at me to be careful.
Does Daze help you cultivate this passion in any way?
Let’s say that going to the cinema, especially in a city like Milan, which is full of them, is a passion that practically anyone can cultivate regardless of their job. Certainly, I appreciate the fact that at Daze, both in smart working and in the office, the schedules are extremely flexible, so if I want to go to a show in the late afternoon, I can organise myself autonomously starting to work – for example – an hour earlier than usual, and be in the theatre by 6pm.
I haven’t yet had the luck to find colleagues in Milan who share the same passion, I hope that changes in the future!