A Few Words About Ulla by Eeva Turunen, the world from a window, “Pagina Tre”, May 23 2026

https://paginatre.it/due-parole-su-ulla-di-eeva-turunen-il-mondo-vissuto-dalla-finestra/

“[…] It seemed to me like a sort of stream of consciousness: a lonely girl, probably bipolar, who looks out at the outside world from her apartment window, reflecting it onto herself through the imaginary creation of dialogues and situations. In particular, Ulla lives in the flat opposite, a girl with whom the protagonist, Allu, is in love. The line between fantasy, imagination, and reality becomes blurred: you live in a constant state of disorientation between past and present, between invented and real situations. A text full of loneliness, but also fraught with situations that have comic overtones. The tragedy of loneliness is eroded by the recounting of situations worthy of silent movie comedy. The gap I found between this proposal and my usual work intrigued me. I accepted it as a wager with myself, to challenge myself with a style of writing very far from my own.

I was looking for a stalemate situation, where everything happened at the window, without too much action. And then the wonderful Anna Magnani in A Human Voice, from Roberto Rossellini’s film L’Amore, came to mind. The episode, based on the play by Jean Cocteau, features the protagonist alone in her room, on the bed, talking on the phone. I needed a talented actress, capable of striking different performative chords, capable of evoking worlds and emotions even where the text seemed to hide them. This is how the collaboration with Alice Giroldini [tag] and our Ulla was born: a production with the protagonist in bed, from where she drives everything; from the bed, Ulla sees and narrates the outside world, which she glimpses from an imaginary window. From the bed, the protagonist performs the text, transforming the staged reading into a sort of acted production with the script pages in hand, which gradually scatter across the bed itself”.