An eight-part story of adolescent love and anguish, We Are Who We Are sees the Call Me By Your Name director return to the sunny beaches of Italy once more
A brief, yet dreamy, trailer for Luca Guadagnino’s much-anticipated debut TV show We Are Who We Are arrived today, along with news that the series will hit screens this September. Marking Guadagnino’s first foray into TV, the series sees the Call Me By Your Name director take to the shores of Italy once again, this time to tell the story of two American teenagers living on a US military base. Exploring themes of first love, friendship and identity, the eight-part coming-of-age drama stars a mix of established and emerging actors, including Jack Dylan Grazer, Jordan Kristine Seamón, Chloë Sevigny, Kid Cudi, Alice Braga, Faith Alabi, and Francesca Scorsese, to name a few, plus an original score by musician Dev Hynes.
The teaser doesn’t reveal much, but it does establish a certain mood – atmospheric piano and synth play as the camera sweeps across a beach, capturing a group of youth playing and running into the sea. The camera then falls upon the series’ more subdued stars Caitlin (Seamón) and Fraser (Grazer), who are sat at a distance from their peers. Only a snippet of dialogue is spoken: “They think we’re weird,” Fraser says. “Does that bother you?” Caitlin replies. In the series, Grazer’s character Fraser is an introverted 14-year-old who has just moved to the military base in Veneto with his mothers, Sarah (Sevigny) and Maggie (Braga). Seamón’s character Caitlin is a “seemingly bold and confident” teenager who has lived with her family on the army base for many years. Though little more is known, images of the characters were also revealed yesterday via the series’ Instagram.
Today, it was also revealed that the show was meant to premiere in May, at the Director’s Fortnight strand of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where reportedly all eight episodes were planned to play consecutively in one screening. Of the series, the festival’s director said: “Luca Guadagnino’s masterful fresco on youth evokes deeply contemporary human questions with delightful freedom and narrative precision, and with a constantly inspired, powerfully sensorial and eminently cinematographic approach.” Though we will have to wait until September to learn more of the show, HBO promises We Are Who We Are will submerge audiences “in all the messy exhilaration and anguish of being a teenager – a story which could happen anywhere in the world, but in this case, happens in this little slice of America in Italy”.
We Are Who We Are will be released on HBO in September, 2020.
