Article by Fabio Bertolotto
Translated by Maria Bellantoni
The Fire Within is a film that focuses less on Herzog’s interest in volcanoes – already demonstrated in La Soufrière (1977) and Into the Inferno (2016) – than on the work of Katia and Maurice Krafft. A requiem, as the subtitle suggests, that revolves around the death of the two famous volcanologists while they were closely studying those giants towards which they felt a real obsession.
read allArticle by: Marta Faggi
Translated by: Rachele Pollastrini
“Huesera”, in Spanish, refers to an expert in treatment of bones and joints diseases. The term, however, also designates The Woman of the Bones, a figure from Mexican mythology whose task is to gather the bones of the dead, symbol of the vital force that doesn’t wear out, and to pray until flesh returns to inhabit those remains, recreating life from disjointed parts. The bones of Valeria (Natalia Solián), in Huesera, constantly creaking, because getting her fingers and the joints of her back crinckled is the protagonist’s way of trying (and not always succeeding) to drain its discomfort out of the body, her frustrations, her ineptitudes. Tormenting Valeria is the awareness that she will soon be a mother: a motherhood apparently sought after, but intimately unwanted.
Continua la lettura di “HUESERA” BY MICHELLE GARZA CERVERAGodland, ultimo film di Hlynur Pálmason, già vincitore della sezione lungometraggi del Torino Film Festival con A white, white day (2019), è una storia di frontiera, il racconto di un prete e fotografo danese (Helliott Crosset Hove) costretto a percorrere l’impervio territorio islandese per raggiungere un villaggio della costa sud-occidentale e costruirci una chiesa. Della spiritualità religiosa, tuttavia, rimane solo il corpo – la carne del mondo nella sua ineluttabile decomposizione. Una spiritualità, quindi, costantemente rigettata nella visceralità delle carni animali, nella trivialità del fango fuori dalle chiese e nell’imprevisto volo di una mosca sul volto senza macchia di un prete.
Article by: Federico Lionetti
Translated by: Noemi Zoppellaro
Godland, the latest film by Hlynur Pálmason, already winner of the feature film section of the Torino Film Festival with A white, white day (2019), is a frontier story, an account of a Danish priest and photographer (Helliott Crosset Hove) forced to travel across the impervious Icelandic territory in order to reach a village on the southwest coast and to build a church there. However, it is only the body that remains from the religious spirituality – the flesh of the world in its inevitable decomposition. A spirituality, therefore, that constantly falls into the viscerality of the animal flesh, into the triviality of the mud outside the churches and into the unexpected flight of a fly on the spotless face of a priest.
READ MOREArticle by: Alice Ferro
Translated by: Arianna Deiro
A neat line of shops appears on screen, billboards sparkle on the walls and the vibrant technicolour of the Sixties almost gives us a sense of peace. It looks like a typical post-war American city, quiet and geometric, maybe too much. The narrating voice asks, “What are we looking at?” and a doubt awakens in us: the buildings are as fake as panels of a set design, the roads look as if they’ve never been walked on, the paint on the signs is new and shiny. This is Riotsville, one of the fake cities built by the American government in the Sixties as military training bases. In these cities, crowds of plain-clothes soldiers staged riots, complete with an audience and cheers, so that their colleagues could learn how to contain them, all in preparation for the civil rights protests that would unleash in the Summer.
Continua la lettura di “RIOTSVILLE, USA” BY SIERRA PETTENGILLArticle by: Marta Faggi
Translated by: Lia Colombo
Michi (Chieko Baishô) evokes memories of her past over the phone: she goes through her life with great melancholy, and she appears grateful to have someone to listen to her. Nothing but her own voice can be heard in her kitchen. On the end of the phone, we find Yoko (Yumi Kawai). She is much younger than her and she remains silent. Even though she would be interested in the old woman’s story, her head is elsewhere. A sudden alarm interrupts Michi’s flow of words: her time is up. Yoko is holding back tears. Eventually Yoko explains to her what will happen the next day and she keeps begging her not to do “it”. Michi hushes “Sayonara.”
read allArticle by: Alice Ferro
Translated by: Cora Bruno
Carlos hangs up the phone and leans against the wall. His eyes are glazed over and he would like to vent but he doesn’t because, as he says, “men don’t cry.” This is the conflict that Un Varón, Fabian Hernández’s new film, sets out to investigate: that of a young man who tries to conform to the ideal of masculinity that prevails on the streets of Bogotá while in private he just wants to be himself. Christmas is approaching and his only wish is to spend it with his increasingly elusive sister and his mother, who is in jail. Leaving the youth center that took him in, he finds himself coming to terms with street life and the law of the alpha male.
read allArticle by: Federico Lionetti
Translated by: Niccolò Sereno
At the University of Turin, on 29 and 30 November, the study conference “Being an actor. Paths and dialogues on training and acting” organized by the “F-ACTOR” project in collaboration with UniVerso and curated by Professor Mariapaola Pierini was held. The conference is part of the research plan of the “F-ACTOR” project, dedicated to the mapping of the actor’s profession in the contemporary Italian media scenario, according to methodologies and study perspectives that refer to performance studies, studies on stardom and media production studies.
Continua la lettura di “BEING AN ACTOR. PATHS AND DIALOGUES ON TRAINING AND ACTING”Article by: Federico Lionetti
Translated by: Anna Polimeni
Carlo Rivolta was a young talent of Italian journalism during the ’77 protest movements, a figure unknown to most, yet capable of describing firsthand the upheavals of this historical period. The crisis of ideologies, the internal clashes of the movement and, above all, the spread of heroin that condemned him, and an entire generation, to an untimely demise.
Continua la lettura di “HEROIN: THE LOST GENERATION” BY MARCO TURCOArticle by: Romeo Gjokaj
Translated by: Federica Boatto
The main difference between us and History is that History does not speak, but we force it to do so. What would happen, however, if it looked us in the face, took us by the hand and started making small talk, telling us about its regrets and pipe dreams? This is exactly what Aleksandr Sokurov’s “Fairytale” aims for: to make History speak spontaneously, quietly and with a hint of humour.
Leggi tutto: “FAIRYTALE” BY ALEKSANDR SOKUROVAdolf Hitler, Iosif Stalin, Benito Mussolini and Winston Churchill find themselves reunited in the afterlife, chatting as they wander through a dark, foggy forest, waiting for the gatekeeper to decide whether to let them into heaven. What about the content of these conversations? Despite their different languages, they mock each other while asserting their political and social ideals. Their speeches focus on their private dimension and therefore erase the aura given by their public function and by History itself. Words thus serve as a tool to reconcile the different points of view and as an attempt to overcome the past and the crystallised image we have of these historical figures. Built through archive footage and without the use of deep-fakes or other artificial intelligence tools, the film calls into question the relationship with reality, verisimilitude, memory and the demythologisation of these personalities. This is an objective that could not have been pursued by using actors to replace the faces, bodies and gestures that changed history. Moreover, the voices lent to the protagonists are perfectly given through an excellent lip-sync that breathes life into the faded images shrouded by the misty reminiscence of the past.
Sokurov seeks to make sense of the challenges that mankind is facing nowadays by taking a step back and lingering on the figures who most shaped the reality we know, namely the protagonists of World War II, the main event that eradicated positivist beliefs about human progress. Trying to empathise with figures such as Hitler and Stalin is the arduous task proposed to the viewer, who through this process realises that behind every historical event, even the most terrible and evil, there are men.
Written by: Fabio Bertolotto
Translated by: Rebecca Arturo
Presented and competing at the fortieth edition of Torino Film Festival, and already winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, competing in the Un Certain Regard section, War Pony marks the directing debut of actress Riley Keough and producer Gina Gammell, featuring an inspiring portrait of the Native American community, directly involved in the making of the film.
Continua la lettura di “WAR PONY” BY RILEY KEOUGH AND GINA GAMMELLArticle by: Davide Troncossi
Translated by: Maria Bellantoni
Honoured by the 40th Turin Film Festival with a retrospective and awarded with the Stella della Mole prize, Malcolm McDowell has been one of the best-known British actors in the world for more than half a century. In particular, for his unforgettable performance as the sadistic and violent Alex De Large in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971).
Leggi tutto: MALCOLM MCDOWELL AWARDED IN TURINIt is difficult to talk about such a popular but atypical figure without repeating what has already been written about him over the decades. McDowell has never been a canonically understood star or even the darling of a specific season or cinematic current. Nevertheless, he has been able to traverse a variety of narratives in European and overseas contexts throughout his prolific career, often guided by great auteurs.
After gaining experience in the theatre, he made his debut in 1968, immediately starring in one of the last peaks of British Free Cinema and a Palme d’Or at Cannes, Lindsay Anderson’s If… (and with this director he would repropose the character of Mick Travis in a sort of truffautian cycle in the following O Lucky Man! in 1973, and Britannia Hospital in 1982). After the unjustly forgotten Figures in a Landscape (1970), an en plein air dystopian film directed by Joseph Losey, Kubrick had no hesitation in calling him out. The ineffable tenderly childlike gaze capable of transforming itself into a perverse grin with the mere hint of a smile was indeed truly unique and terrifying, and embodied the very essence of the very young criminal from the pen of Anthony Burgess.
Having attained his place in the pantheon of the seventh art (not without courageous sacrifices – just remember the serious corneal injuries suffered during the endless filming of the famous ‘Ludovico technique), McDowell’s image was marked for better or worse by those dazzling beginnings, failing to follow up on that first happy season. However, by stubbornly getting back into the game from the 1980s onwards, he was able to start a prolific second professional life, carving out a space in which to express his versatility, often in secondary roles, but always leaving a personal mark beyond the actual merits of the films.
We remember Cat People by Paul Schrader (1982), The Assassin of the Tsar by Karen Shakhnazarov (1991), Gangster No. 1 by Paul McGuigan (2000), Evilenko by David Grieco (2004), a couple of Altman and Mike Kaplan’s tasty one-man show Never Apologize (2007) to remember his friend/mentor Anderson in his own way. We tasted this ability as a performer also during the festival, in a masterclass full of anecdotes and brilliant jokes and, again, in the witty presentations of the films on offer, demonstrating a verve (79 years old and he looks great), the charisma and at the same time the affability of the star capable of involving even the youngest audiences.
The Turin prize helps fill the gap of the far too few awards given by the film world to McDowell (he was snubbed by the Oscars and the Baftas, he had a single Golden Globe nomination, a special European Film Awards, and a special Nastro d’Argento), but meeting him in person allowed us once and for all to dispel the evil aura that surrounds his cinematic double: Malcolm was never Alex.
Written by: Luca Giardino
Translated by: Simone Gasparini
“Don’t murder me, okay?” With these words Lea (Lily McInerny), a 17-year-old girl, responds to the proposal of Tom (Jonathan Tucker), a man in his mid-30s, to drive her home after a bad night out with friends. The tone in which Lea utters the sentence is ironic, but her lost gaze conceals an underlying reticence. Perhaps contained in that moment of carefree interdiction is the core of Palm Trees and Power Lines, Jamie Dack’s debut feature, which has already won Best Director at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and was presented in competition at the 40th Turin Film Festival.
Leggi tutto: “PALM TREES AND POWER LINES” BY JAMIE DACKThe film presents a glimpse of Lea’s life during the last weeks of summer before school starts again: her everyday life in the American suburbia bores her, her friends are childish and immature, and her relationship with her mother Sandra (Gretchen Mol) – the only member of her family – is becoming more tense. Meeting Tom shakes the girl up and offers her an escape from her reality. Lea is fascinated by the fact that Tom is older but at the same time she does not let herself go completely. Tom acts like the perfect boyfriend: he woos her, gives her gifts, and takes her to the beach, but he hides a dark side that Lea decides to ignore and that will lead her to come to terms with a painful trauma in the finale.
The political intent of the film is clear but does not cloud either the form or the content. The work, in fact, deals with such edgy issues as child grooming and the difficult reality of many families in the American suburbs. Furthermore, it also features many burdensome lines, the majority of which are delegated to Lea’s character. To bring an example, she says, referring to her mother, “Some people shouldn’t have the right to have children”. At the same time, the work offers some rather unusual formal solutions of the coming-of-age drama. Jamie Dack, in fact, forgoes stylistic virtuosity to offer understated, unadulterated direction, demonstrating a desire to communicate a need, indeed an urgency in narrating certain events rather than dwelling on the visual component. The clean, static look of Dack’s camera not only offers new possibilities to the representation of the genre, but also showcases the originality of the director’s work and the courage with which she affirms a personal and authentic vision even from her first work.
Article by: Sara Longo
Translated by: Noemi Zoppellaro
It is the 27th of February 2012 when, during the eviction in Chiomonte, Luca Abbà climbs on a high-voltage pylon: the aim is to slow down the operations of expropriation carried out to widen the construction site of the tunnel, of that “great strategic work”, still pending to this day. The contact with the high-voltage cables causes him to fall ten metres. Although unconscious, his body keeps being traversed by electric shocks. He has a punctured lung. He goes into a deep coma.
Read allArticle by: Cristian Cerutti
Translated by: Simone Gasparini
Reviewing Chiusura by Alessandro Rossetti twenty-one years after its release makes the analysis of the film even more arduous. Seeing a world that doesn’t exist anymore and sensing the awareness that the world itself had that it had reached a terminal stage – the end of a millennium and all the fears attached to it – generates in the viewer a mixture of anxiety and tenderness. There is love for a fading past but, concurrently, there is the awareness that not much has changed. Even years later, the province remains a swampy, stagnant place that is difficult to escape from but, through the cinematic image, it simultaneously gains a romantic and fascinating appeal. It is precisely the ability to show this double soul of the province and this gap between fading tradition and advancing modernity that makes Alessandro Rossetto’s cinema great. Chiusura, as said by the director himself, is a film that, years later, has become a reflection of the passing of time.
Read all: “CHIUSURA” BY ALESSANDRO ROSSETTOThe documentary, which has been restored by Istituto Luce under Rossetto’s supervision, follows the closure of Mrs. Flavia’s hair salon after 44 years of activity. The director, an anthropology graduate, carefully examines the small gestures of this world, the words of the inhabitants who inhabit it, and the conflicts which animate it. Alongside this world, there are others: the circus which comes to town and the local women’s soccer team. The observation of these worlds focuses in the same way on the imperceptible rituals and conflicts, and on the personal emotions of the people who inhabit them.
However, hovering over this microcosm is the winter fog, a constant element of the film, which amplifies the feeling of stillness and even of finality, namely the closure of a period that has come to its end. Nevertheless, what stands out is the beauty of these elements and real cinema’s ability to give charm to the things of ordinary life. The feeling of paralysis transcends and becomes beauty: personal gestures, words and speeches become captivating and fascinating in the eyes of the viewer.
Elapsed time thus amplifies the experience of viewing Chiusura, to which the reflections on time and the end of an era are added in retrospect to a period that has now passed, but whose emotions and feelings remain incredibly vivid.
Article by: Emidio Sciamanna
Translated by: Cora Bruno
Nagisa, a debut feature film by Japanese director Kogahara Takeshi, can be interpreted as a complex and layered attempt to reframe a bond, to redefine that thin filament that connects the body of those who survive and the increasingly evanescent memory of those who are no longer with us. The world that is portrayed is thus the result of a blurred mental condition, a set of indistinct reenactments created by the mind of a boy detached from reality.
Read all: “NAGISA” BY KOGAHARA TAKESHIThe protagonist is Fuminao, a Tokyo boy tormented by guilt over the death of his younger sister Nagisa, who died three years earlier in a bus accident on her way to visit her brother. One night, the boy accompanies his friend Yuki to visit a tunnel that, according to some popular beliefs, appears to be haunted by ghosts. In this mysterious and gloomy place, he will again face his past, his origins, until he relives in his mind the intense relationship with his missing sister. The film is basically a reprise of a homonymous short film by Kogahara himself in 2017, in which the two main characters, again Fuminao and Nagisa, are two young people in love. The adolescent “love story” of the former is thus contrasted, in this second work, with the memory of a deceased person and the reminder of the faint sigh of death, in a mad dance involving Eros and Thanatos until they become part of the same being.
The protagonist’s apathy, as well as the alienation that affects his existence, arise from the strong trauma triggered by the loss of a loved one. For this reason, the young man’s life is constantly punctuated by mechanical movements and continuous silences, depicted through the use of repeated and interminable fixed shots. The story is fragmented, not at all linear, as if every shred of memory spontaneously resurfaces when Fuminao savors certain physical or emotional sensations. This makes the film a real labyrinth with no way out, a puzzle in which, at times, it is difficult to understand the meaning of certain events.
At the end of this enigmatic existential journey, there are many questions that arise, raising more doubts than answers in the protagonist’s mind. “Do ghosts really exist?” the boy hesitantly asks a policeman he meets by chance outside the tunnel. The man’s answer will come only after a long and ostentatious silence: “The ghost is you.” It is those who have remained anchored in the past, unable to continue a normal life, like a woman wandering the streets in search of her missing son, who represent the real ghosts of society.
Written by: Yulia Neproshina
Translated by: Rebecca Arturo
The unbearable weight of manipulative ambiguity, unfounded guilt, and complicit silences. Maria Schrader’s new film, out of the competition at the 40th edition of the Torino Film Festival, is a protest against Harvey Weinstein that unleashes the desire to cry out that women have been deprived of for so long, and thereby redeems the right to their voice.
Leggi tutto: “SHE SAID” BY MARIA SCHRADERA young woman at the very start of her career, her soul bursting with dreams and her eyes full of naive hope, is overcome by a request as unexpected as it is inappropriate just when she was planning to attend a business meeting. “He ripped out my voice that day, just as I was starting to find it,” discloses Laura Madden, confessing her years-long belief that she was the only one who did not have the strength to stand up to the harassment from the powerful and feared Miramax producer. Laura was far from alone, but her persecutor was for a long time protected by a well-established system that systematically and scrupulously shielded the offenders. New York Times’ reporters Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Zakan) undertook an investigative enquiry to expose the harassment and sexual abuse committed by Weinstein, who had crossed not only professional boundaries, but also national borders, committing countless abuses overseas.
The She Said crew is well aware that they are telling a true story and do not allow room for unnecessary violence, to which women are already abundantly exposed.
Weinstein’s towering physical presence is rendered by the oral testimonies of women who describe episodes in which he holds the unmistakable authority of the perpetrator. At the same time, his voice is emblematic, as we hear it in voice over, as violent and arrogant as the suffocating agreements he induced his victims to sign, ‘legally’ depriving them of their dignity. We retrace, guided by these testimonies, the spaces from which they would have so much wanted to escape, as in a nightmare from which they were not allowed to awaken. This film, however, also wants to be a safe space for all the women involved in order to express themselves and share their grief and anger. First and foremost, Megan and Jodi, that we follow far beyond the investigative processes and that Maria Schrader reveals to us with great sensitivity and respect. The cooperation and supervision of those directly involved and their permission to enter into each other’s private lives were undoubtedly essential to achieve the goal of producing a film that resonates strongly and encourages women to trust each other.
Translated by: Bendetta Francesca De Rossi
Article by: Francesco Ghio
Having a proper compass on which one can rely can often prove to be a necessity in order not to lose one’s way too much; especially in a society which changes its skin year after year. Sometimes the right compass can be found close by, in one’s own backyard, in the apparent simplicity of a sentence spent by a person close to one’s heart; at other times, it is necessary to move away, especially if one’s loved ones, or at least those who once were, have emigrated, crossing borders, hoping for a better future. Daniele Vicari’s Compass for over ten years was Ettore Scola and Orlando, presented out of competition at the 40th Turin Film Festival, is dedicated to him.
READ MOREArticle by: Davide Troncossi
Translated by: Maria Bellantoni
TFF40’s Back to life section dedicated to film restoration proposed a diptych of particular interest on Italian polar, restoring two of its rare gems to their original splendour. Made at a distance of time and with different characteristics, the two films are united by the cold reception they received from critics and audiences at the time of their release and then rose to cult movie status.
Read all: BACK TO LIFE: THE RETURN OF ITALIAN POLARMilano calibro 9 (1972) today represents not only the pinnacle of Fernando Di Leo’s career, but also the only Italian polar film of the period able to hold its own against the vaunted American and European crime films (between 1970 and 1972, masterpieces such as Friedkin’s The French Connection, Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge and Hodges’ Carter were released). And we would be talking about perfection if it were not for the Manichaeism of some scenes between the commissioner (Wolff) and his deputy (Pistilli) imbued with cheap socio-political rhetoric.
The restoration presented by the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale has the great merit of restoring the overlays of the hours and days wanted by the director for the cyclical development of the plot (the title that was originally chosen was “Da lunedì a lunedì“) and of restoring the right visual and sound polish to the events of Rocco (Adorf), Nelly (Bouchet) and, above all, Ugo Piazza (a granitic Moschin), the victim, or diabolical architect, of a violent redde rationem in the organised underworld of Milan (this will become clear in the finale with a splendid triple act). The digital copy enhances the masterful direction aimed at dictating the tight rhythm (Di Leo himself, without modesty, stated “no one in Europe, apart from Melville, had the grit of an American cut that I had”) and the faithfulness of the screenplay to Scerbanenco’s anthology of hard-boiled tales from which it is based.
The picture of the acknowledged progenitor of the Italian-style detective film is completed by the neo-realist setting in which a gallery of extraordinary pulp characters act (Tarantino, by his own admission, will draw on this with full force), the pressing music by Bacalov and Osanna, and the creeping underlying determinism.
Nevertheless, one has to shift to Turin thirty years later for the other submerged and ‘cursed’ neo-noir.
Tre punto sei (2003), the debut and only feature film by the late Nicola Rondolino (son of the well-known film critic and historian Gianni), due to a series of production and distribution issues, it required a delicate recovery operation by Cinecittà, the National Cinema Museum of Turin and Augustus Color, who aimed at overcoming the obstacle of the absence of an original negative.
A versatile and much-loved figure in his hometown, who died prematurely in 2013, Rondolino immediately demonstrated an uncommon talent in his debut picture (but only few noticed it), bending genre clichés into a narrative that is not ordinary thanks to a contemporary style composed of dizzying ellipses, telluric action scenes and meaningful dramaturgical moments of clashes between the different characters. The vivid coherence of the multi-ethnic criminal imagery set in the Turin neighbourhood of San Salvario strikes a chord, avoiding the traps of the most retrograde racial prejudices, while the intense Binasco stands out in the role of the corrupt policeman madly in love with the woman contended by his best friend (a darker-than-ever Giallini), a disillusioned gangster in the service of a sui generis drug clan (an interesting experiment in quotations from The Sopranos).
The rediscovery of Tre punto sei is therefore a necessary step in the 40th anniversary of the festival that saw Rondolino as selector for a long time, regretting what he could have given to our cinema.
Written by: Alessandro Pomati
Translated by: Lia Colombo
Two people are wandering in the depths of the wood; a bus drives into a tunnel whose exit cannot be seen; a thick blanket of smoke. These are just a few of the images that Stefan Costantinescu’s first feature film exploits. On one hand, the viewer can perceive the disorientation that Doru (Bogdan Dumitrache), a laborer who has emigrated to Sweden from Romania, feels upon his return. On the other, we witness his wife Nicoleta (Ofelia Popii), his teenage daughter, and his arteriosclerotic mother’s way of “welcoming” him “back” with no more than surprise and coldness; the only one to feel any genuine emotion seems to be his faithful dog Amza. Behind Doru’s unexpected return there is actually more to than the work-related reason he keeps peddling to anyone who asks: while in Sweden, Doru received anonymous messages informing him of his wife’s alleged marital infidelity. Therefore, the true purpose of his return to Romania is to verify their authenticity.
Read more: “MAN AND DOG” BY STEFAN COSTANTINESCULike many of his compatriots (Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu), Costantinescu is able to create glacial and frozen atmospheres, where tensions swirl without erupting, if not at their very limit. This justifies the cold and aseptic tones of the cinematography, and the indoor shots with the clear aim of “imprisoning” the protagonists. Moreover, those scenes are built with sequence-plans in order to allow the viewer to pick every single word of what the characters say to each other. The risk of epigonism is avoided because the camera, like Doru, also breaks free from staticity and begins to peddle the characters generating a great deal of suspense, in full Hitchcockian style. While witnessing this “stalking” process, we end up putting together the pieces of the image of a country where patriarchal culture still takes hold, where the woman is not even allowed to go have a coffee without her husband’s approval, while the latter’s affairs and escapades are all but forbidden.
Through a withdrawn performance, Dumitrache is remarkably effective in capturing the grotesque dimension of the broken man. Sometimes he also manages to evoke laughter in the viewer – even in the context of domestic violence in which the film is set. Nevertheless, his partner Popii also shines with a great performance of glacial irony. However, any intended or unintended trace of humor disappears in the powerful finale: it dodges the mere consolation aim and seems to suggest that even in a society where everyone is cold, violent, distant (with or without COVID-19), mean, and obsessed with IKEA, one can always find something to hold on to. It is a struggle, but it can be done; even if you are a little bit of a man, and a little bit of a beast.
Article by: Sara Longo
Translated by: Rachele Pollastrini
“After spending a few weeks with the watchmakers, my views on socialism were resolved: I was an anarchist.” With this sentence by Pyotr Kropotkin extracted from his Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1877), director Cyril Schäublin decided to start his second feature film ‘Unrest’ in which, by reconstructing the events of 1870, he recounts how the independence of thought of the artisans in the Jura Mountains ignited the spark for the birth of the international anarchist movement.
Continua la lettura di “UNREST” BY CYRIL SCHÄUBLIN
