Tales of Tarot

Director Statement

I came to Tarocchi e Racconti knowing the Tarot the way most people know it: as a tool for reading the future, something mystical and decorative, the kind of thing you find at a fair or in the back of a bookshop. What I didn’t know was that the Tarot had a history. A real one, with dates and contracts and named patrons. Cards commissioned by a 15th-century Duke of Milan in 1415. Decks mass-produced in Bologna by 1450 under documented agreements. A Church that exempted the game from its gambling prohibitions, and then, under Savonarola, turned against it. The more I read, the more I wanted to know. By the time we were filming, I was seeing Tarot everywhere: in Renaissance painting, in medieval iconography, in the structure of how people thought about fate and order and the world. The cards turned out to be a key to the medieval and Renaissance mind.

The project itself began with years of research. Sasha, is an art historian who continued her father’s lifelong study of the Tarot and its symbolism. When we realized that no one had ever attempted a complete documentary treatment of the subject, that the Major Arcana had never been explored in depth in modern media, we decided to do it ourselves. Italy is where the cards were born, and Italy is where the foremost experts in the field still work today. It was the right place, the right subject, and the right moment.

I wanted the series to feel different from the documentaries I knew. A talking-heads format, but with a twist: fictional characters from different eras gathered in a chamber outside of time, debating each card the way Boccaccio’s characters might have debated love or death. The Tarot has traveled through centuries, picking up interpretations and accusations as it went. It seemed only right that the people arguing about it should also have traveled through time.

Working with our experts was the heart of the experience. They have spent their lives studying this subject, and the conversations I had with them are the kind that change how you think. Many of them still live in my head as the project moves toward its audience.
Tarocchi e Racconti is, in the end, about the joy of discovering that something familiar is also unfamiliar. That history is hiding inside images we thought we already understood. I made the series I would have wanted to watch myself before I knew any of this. My hope is that viewers come away the way I did: surprised, curious, and seeing the Tarot in a way they hadn’t before.