"He tapped the pen before every vote. Nobody has tapped since."
Eleven years into filming a Fiumicino fishing-boat council, Ludovica Serra misses one small sound more than any speech: the old chairman's pen, twice on the table, before the hands went up.
Ludovica Serra picks a blue biro off her kitchen windowsill in Rome and taps it on the table. Twice, flat, with a pause after. "Like that," she says. "His was slightly worse. The cap rattled."
The old chairman did this before every vote of the Fiumicino fishing-boat council. Mooring fees, a dead ice machine, whether to repaint the hall. Tap, tap, then hands. He stepped down in 2022 and the sound left with him. His successor counts hands out loud. "He is very good," Serra says. "He is clear. It's just a room now."
She has filmed the council since 2015. That is 129 monthly meetings and 388 hours of tape. She has not decided whether any of it is a film. She is certain about the tap.
Every month she drives out to the coast with a green plastic chair in the back seat. The left arm is cracked. She carries it to the end of the council table and puts it in the frame. It is for Bruno Maffeo, a skipper who stopped coming in March 2023 and never explained. The chair stays in shot for the whole meeting. Serra does not mention it to the others, and nobody asks.
Two other members died while she was filming. Settimio Corvo, who mended nets, in the winter of 2021. Gelsomina Ranieri, who kept the minutes by hand, in 2024. Serra says she can still hear Gelsomina's pen on paper under every argument. It is a quieter cousin of the chairman's tap, and it is also gone.
There is a plan, loosely. If the film gets finished, Bruno gets the first copy. She says he will watch it with his arms folded and tell her the sound is wrong.
She taps the biro again. Twice, a pause, then she puts it down.
"Never three," she says. "Three was when he'd lost his place."
