An elderly painter climbs the steep cliff face of Brittany’s coastline, wearing worn-out clothes and holding his palette, easel and brushes in hand. Upon reaching a secluded grotto, he is free to express his imagination against the stunning coastal backdrop. This is the opening scene of Barbet Schroeder’s latest documentary, Ricardo et la peinture (“Ricardo and painting”), which premiered Out of Competition at the 41st Turin Film Festival.
In Cambio Cambio (“Change Change”), one of the movies presented out of competition in the “Nuovi Sguardi Argentini” (“New Argentinian Perspectives”) section at the 41st Torino Film Festival, Lautaro García Candela paints a picture of Generation Z in a post-pandemic Argentina, somewhere between a thriller and a love story.
The sea, a mound of earth and some buildings are the opening images of Anulloje Ligjin, a documentary that talks about the mysterious reality of a country which has been isolated from the rest of the European continent for 40 years. Albania, in this film, is shown in all its desolation and inconsistencies, but also in its profound creative energy and resistance.
It is a customary practice in Crotone for young men to build a wooden pyramid to set fire in honour of St. Lucy on December 13th. Cooperation becomes a prerequisite for winning the friendly and traditional competition that takes place every year among the town districts to see who can build the highest and most impressive fire. “We must ensure that our Jesus Fund gets published in newspapers, and nobody else.” Even if the press won’t pay attention to them, the story of the Jesus Fund community will be told in Lux Santa (“Holy light”). This film, directed by Matteo Russo and presented as part of the 41st Turin Film Festival’s Italian documentary competition, sheds light on their experiences.
From the beginning, the director Ali Kalthami explains to the audience the double connotation of the Arabic word “Mandoob”, which means “courier” but also “a person pitied for his misery and tragic end”. Mandoob – Night Courier – part of the feature film competition of the 41st edition of Torino Film Festiva – turns the same double meaning of the word into an ambiguous thriller connotated by a strong sense of humor, which shows the power of desperation in the protagonist’s misadventures.
Kalak’s Greenland is endless. The deep fjord inlets are topped by steep, snow-capped mountain walls. Kulusuk is a small village in East Greenland, made up of a few isolated houses with sloping roofs and bright colors. Jan (Emil Johnsen) takes refuge in Kulusuk with his wife and children, after life in Nuuk has become intolerable. This is not the first time Jan has run away from something: before living in Greenland, he lived in Denmark with his father. He always runs away from himself and his past, in a stressed search for a sense of belonging and community.
A little girl dies and is born again. This is the obsessive research of a maternity which makes the creation of life look like an unfulfilled purpose. What does the idea of parenting bodies and ideas mean? Can creation, intended as a prosthesis of ourselves in eternity, be a possible cure for death? The debut feature film Birth/Rebirth by director Laura Moss tries to answer these questions through the story of two totalizing and petrifying gestations.
Since we were kids, when being first shown a geographical map, political boundaries seemed so obvious and natural to us that we were ready to be tested at school. They may have changed over time, but they remain precise and defined at all times. Paradoxically, it is precisely when at the boundaries that we realise how much those lines we saw reproduced on maps are actually invisible, and how much the very concept of a border is artificial, aimed at reassuringly determining every aspect of our existence. It is in one of those places, in the municipality of Oulx, on the border between Italy and France, that Virginia Bellizzi observes the numerous fleeting passages of migrants in search of a better future.
The sky burns above Leon (Thomas Schubert), a hopeless author, as he is writing a book without first having thought of an actual story. Concern is evident on his face while he repeats to himself that others do not understand him, his clothes are always black and he often hides in the shadows, he lies in wait at the blind spot of a door window to peek at other people’s lives. He has a tattoo on his chest, barely visible and which can only be glimpsed behind the hem of his shirt: it looks like the perfect picture to represent someone who is almost afraid to be part of the real world.
The colossal shadow of wind turbines looms intermittently over Maria Lukyanova’s face, the protagonist of Grace, as if to recall the centrifugal rage by which she is invested. She closes her eyelids and imagines an escape from the van in which she has lived for as long as she can remember and where her father (Gela Chitava), has placed his last hopes. A dwelling where father and daughter travel through Russia’s remote provinces, screening old films in villages where the internet has not yet taken over. For the protagonist, the escape from her father and consequently from their life as a nomad – or rather, as «travelers», as the man points out – materializes in the sea, which she can only dream about through the images of female swimmers in an old television set and in the plastic attractions of a water park inside a shopping mall.
“What happens to a country when an entire page of its history is erased?” This is the starting point of Felipe Gálvez’s debut feature film Los colonos (“The settlers”). A raw and refined film that, through the journey of three men charged by landowner Jose Menéndez to find a “safe” – meaning “cleansed” of Indians – route to the shores of the Atlantic, brings attention to the genocide of the indigenous Selk’nam people perpetrated at the beginning of the 20th century for long obscured by Chile’s official history.
«What are you doing? Are you sleeping at this time? No. I’m dreaming.».
If we could see with a painter’s eye Mimmo Calopresti’s portrait of one of Italy’s most beloved and most brilliant designers, it would appear to us as a chiaroscuro. This docu-fiction alternates between reality and fiction, past and present, the protagonist’s extensive cultural background and the abandonment of his studies. A duality that converges, in the end, in the construction of a great character, a down-to-earth dreamer: “I live in a dream. My dream is coming true: to be Gianni Versace.”
The “minestrone” (“melting pot”), which Steve Della Casa has mentioned many times on his last year in office before passing over the direction to Giulio Base, doesn’t refer to one of the titles of the retrospective section dedicated to Sergio Citti, rather to the result of the selection made by the manager and his staff. It’s not a miscellany that risks displeasing anyone, but a compact and consistent organism, composed of films and different activities – masterclasses, unscheduled events, talk shows and conferences – which dialogues with each other because of both affinity and opposition, always having filmmaking as their only essential reference.
