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 documentary about young people for young people, I 400 giorni: funamboli e maestri (“The 400 days: funambulists and masters”) shows the (first) 400 days in the professional life of twenty-four young actors and actresses from all around Italy. This documentary film shows how they share fears, expectations, interests and hopes, like young Antoine does – the protagonist of the famous film The 400 Blows by François Truffaut, who not by chance is commemorated here.
The topic of motherhood has been and still is often addressed in cinema through the most diverse perspectives and sensibilities. Anglo-American filmmaker Savanah Leaf’s approach stands out in the contemporary landscape for its unique freshness and delicacy, making her Earth Mama – based on the short documentary The Heart Still Hums, co-directed with Taylor Russell – an extraordinarily powerful debut feature film.
Stefan (Stefan Gota), is a Romanian mason who suffers from insomnia, shaggy-faced and always wearing shorts. ShuXiu (Liyo Gong), is a lively Chinese biologist, sweet-eyed and often absorbed in her work. Both wander in a nocturnal Brussels and in its surroundings, between the long shots of under-construction buildings and details of mosses and windblown trees; they wander, get lost and find each other in a contemporary world, a biome in which the relationship of dependency between human and nature progresses into a stable understanding.
For his 8th feature-length film, La Práctica (“The practice”), Martín Rejtman leaves his beloved Argentina for neighbouring Chile. The main character, Gustavo (Esteban Bigliardi), goes through a journey that is similar to a spiritual retreat trying to reconnect with meditative yoga. Both the director and the main character – who is sort of an alter ego of his creator – will see their innovative dreams clash with reality. As it often happens in the Argentinian director’s films, whatever happens to the helpless characters doesn’t really have a substantial effect in their lives.
A woman stands beyond a net, armed with a rifle, peering into the empty pool below where a caged tiger, the pet of a gangster, lies.
This marks the beginning of Andrei Tănase’s film, developed as part of the TorinoFilmLab 2019 which globally premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2023. The opening scene introduces the two main characters, their connection is evident through the first frames.
What’s left of Sofia (Sofia Tomic) are clothes, laid out as if they were laundry hanging in the sun. What’s left of Sofia is the carving of a heart on a tree, the sound of a thud in the water, and the echo of a dog barking in the face of an irreparable choice. Even Sofia’s tattoo drawings survive, failing to fulfil the uncomfortable situation she ended up herself in. Actually, Sofia’s past and the memory of her last wanderings, are sealed in Sofia Foi, the debut feature film by Brazilian director Pedro Geraldo.
«Can we stay like this for a while?» says Sofia, sure that she no longer has to fear her vulnerability, because she finally has a person in front of her who can understand her fragility. A fictitious safety that is swept away by an outbreak of yellow fever, which turns Sofia’s life into a long tunnel where absence and the rumbling of death dominate.
Marinaleda by Louis Séguin, and Michel Vay by Nicolas Deschuyteneer and Patricia Gélise – two medium-length films presented at the Turin Film Festival in the Crazies section – address the road movie genre in opposite ways. In the former, the journey is a collective experience and becomes a pretext for enjoying the pleasure of sharing; in the latter, the journey is depicted as a metaphorical, intimate and private experience of the passage from an earthly dimension to a transcendent one. Marinaleda is a “political” road movie in which two vampires hitchhike from France to Spain to reach the town of Marinaleda, where a communist administration is in force. Amid new acquaintances, erotic moments and social discourses, it is the in-camera glances of the characters that capture the audience, inviting them to immerse in the vampire marxist-like philosophy of life according to which blood feasting becomes an altruistic gesture of body sharing – they are vampires of human and gentle nature with whom it is easy to empathize, in an atmosphere that reminds us of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Survive (2013), which also shares a fascination for slow narrative and a posed humour with Louis Séguin’s film.
Michel Vay tells of the introspective and transcendental escape journey of an outlaw who has just committed a robbery. A path to Michel’s death that moves between the concreteness of landscapes and the abstractness of the protagonist’s psychological torments, represented in the journey inside his mind through dance steps and music sounds. Attempting to narrate the passage between life and death, between the material and the immaterial in sixty minutes only, the film is at times overly ambitious, in a stylistic search for the perfect image that sometimes forgets the importance of audience involvement. A complacent nonlinear narrative that results in a didactic and predictable ending, with the concluding shot echoing the opening one, recalling a cyclical conception of life. A daring experimentation that is not perfectly successful and that not even the pleasant musical moments and Dantean quotations succeed to make truly exciting.
In Víctor Erice’s movies – four in a career that began fifty years ago – cinema, both as a physical place and as a technical and expressive device, has always played a central role. Her first feature film, The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena, 1973), told the story of a little girl who was shocked after watching Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931). In El sur (The South) (1983) the protagonist discovered her father’s betrayal in a hall where movies featuring the man’s lover were shown. Cinema as an influential art device, capable of having concrete effects on reality, can also be found in Cerrar los ojos (Close your eyes), the director’s latest work.
Climate change is not a fairy tale, and the director makes this clear. Éléonore Saintagnan immerses us in an unusual atmosphere, almost as if it was a science fiction film. I prefer to label it as a fictional feature teetering on the edge of reality — a film that calls into question a monster to shed light on a pressing issue: the drying up of lakes.
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 Spanish director Pablo Berger and the Arcadia Motion Pictures renew their collaboration to create their first 2D animated film. As with the previous Blancanieves (“Snow White”, 2012) – a black and white silent film – the director feels the need to reconnect with the essence of early 20th century cinema. For Robot Dreams he also looks back to the past, specifically to traditional animation, fascinated by its unlimited possibilities of storytelling and representation. Berger succeeds in tackling the challenge of the step-by-step technique – or, frame by frame – with ease, thanks to the habit of creating storyboards, which allowed him to integrate an ideal process for the development of animation.
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.
In Milan’s Labanof, the Laboratory of Forensic Anthropology and Odontology at the University of Milan, Professor Cristina Cattaneo takes care of bodies without identities, which she calls “pure strangers.” These same bodies give their name to Valentina Cicogna and Mattia Colombo’s documentary: Sconosciuti puri (“Pure strangers”), which is dedicated to the struggles of forensic anthropologist’s work.
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.
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. This idea, which can be traced back to the Heraclitean philosophy of Panta Rei, “everything flows,” well represents the meta-cinematic spirit of Retake, Japanese director Kôta Nakano’s debut. The film was presented at the Nuovimondi (“New Worlds”) section of the 41st Torino Film Festival.
In Kleber Mendonça Filho’ debut film, O Som ao Redor (“Neighbouring sounds”, 2012), there’s a scene in which two people visit an abandoned cinema and the sound recalls films that used to be shown there in the past. Through this dimension, images manifest themselves as spectres that want to communicate with the living, echoing in crumbling and forgotten places. The last work of the Brazilian director, Retratos fantasmas (“Pictures of ghosts”) – presented at the International Documentaries Competition of the 41 st edition of the Torino Film Festival – is based on the same concept of returning images.
It’s tough to picture what thousands of young people must have felt when, after years under the regime, they suddenly had the chance to cross their country’s borders and freely explore cities like London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, or Amsterdam. It’s not surprising that László Csáki wanted to create an animated documentary to leverage drawing possibilities and convey the feelings of an entire generation in Hungary during the 1990s, following the breakup of the People’s Republic and the Soviet Union.
