Olio Favola

A brand film for Olio Favola, the extra virgin olive oil line of Azienda Agricola Oliva, a family business based in Syracuse that has been growing olives for over seventy years between the Iblei mountains and the Syracusan coast.

The story

A young woman finds a wrapped parcel outside her front door. She opens it: inside is a letter from her father. As she reads, we hear the father’s voice speaking those same words.

In the letter he describes breaking down in his car somewhere near Syracuse, and being helped, purely by chance, by a woman. Her name is Francesca — the same name as his daughter — and she runs the company that makes the oil. Francesca takes him out among the olive groves and talks about her own father: how he loved those trees, how he brought her there as a child and told her that olive leaves should be stroked so that they will give good fruit.

That is the moment the man starts thinking about his own daughter, and about the time they have spent together.

The approach

Extra virgin olive oil cannot be sold by showing the bottle: on the shelf it looks identical to a thousand others. And the visual vocabulary of the category — fields at sunset, hands harvesting, oil pouring — is so worn that anyone using it ends up resembling everyone else at the exact moment they are trying to stand apart.

This film goes the other way. The product is barely named at all; in its place sit emotional memory and the family history behind the company. The line about stroking the leaves is the hinge, because it holds both things together without explaining either — it is at once a real agricultural gesture and the way a father speaks to a daughter.

The shared name does the rest: the coincidence that triggers the memory is also what binds the viewer to the story, before anyone has worked out what the film is selling.

Two minutes sixteen, the running time of a brand film. The letter structure — one voice writing, one figure reading — is what makes that length bearable: the voice-over carries the thread while the images are free to go elsewhere.

The company’s olives are picked by hand and pressed within twelve hours, cold extracted at its own mill. The Favola line includes single-varietal oils, among them Nocellara Etnea.