Mauro Santini

It's an event that draws many thousands of music lovers to one of the most beautiful cities in the world every summer: the opera season at the ancient Arena di Verona. The 2,000-year-old roman amphiteatre with its gigantic stage dimensions is one of the largest and best preserved Roman construction of its kind, and with over 22,000 seats it is undoubtedly one of the most spectacular open-air venues of the world! The revered master of opera Franco Zeffirelli, who died shortly before the premiere of Il Trovatore, created a legendary scenery with groups of giant sized armoured knights, a fortress turning into a luminous cathedral, an enormous choir, horses, breathtaking fights: “his perhaps best arena production” (Opernglas). It brings Anna Netrebko to the Arena of Verona where she is giving her much-anticipated debut in one of Giuseppe Verdi’s most popular operas.

Three months in the life of Chiara, an actress pushing forty and trying to find her way in a bustling Rome overrun by tourists. Invisible, precarious, Chiara restlessly piles up one experience after another, searching for the thing that will make her feel alive.

For Filmmaker Film Festival (2023), Fulvio Baglivi and Cristina Piccino asked some filmmakers (R. Beckermann, J. Bressane, D’Anolfi/Parenti, T. De Bernardi, L. Di Costanzo, A. Fasulo, F. Ferraro, M. Frammartino, S. George, ghezzi/Gagliardo, C. Hintermann, G. Maderna, A. Momo, A. Rossetto, M. Santini, C. Simon, S. Savona) to give us their own "lost road," that is, a sequence, scene or piece of editing that did not later find its way into the final version of one of their works. Each fragment has its own accomplished presence, often has a different title from the film it was made for, which is not necessary to have seen in order to find meaning; on the contrary, those who set out thinking they know the world they are walking through will find themselves displaced.

Corso Salani's voice for "Dove sono stato", a film about the disappearance of a friend, is now embodied in the places where he should have starred in a film. Empty fields, which will forever miss the body of the missing friend, to document the absence and listen once again to a dear voice.

I have always looked for evidence of a lived time in a shaky shot or in unusable queues, or in the temporal dilation of a fragment. With Notturno this research continues within the image, penetrating it, running the pleasant risk of getting lost within it.

Discreetly following the restoration work carried out in the piano nobile of the Ducal Palace of Urbino, Le opere, i giorni enters the bustling life of the construction site, taking viewers behind the scenes of a three-year process marked by uncertainties, discoveries, and transformations. An unprecedented, in medias res perspective from which to glimpse the enchanting harmony of one of the most significant sites of the Italian Renaissance.

"Made following the loss of my father, 'Di Ritorno' is a video very dear to me because it is intimately populated with voices, sounds and people who are no longer here. The movement of the train that takes me back to my childhood home, evoked by a sleepless night, is accompanied by an emotional backward movement: perhaps the only possibility of meeting lies in not moving, in waiting."

It's a story that begins long ago. In the early 2000s, a young comic artist decided to tell stories through drawings, far from the canons of mainstream comics. He did it under the banner of DIY and sharing: small, stapled booklets, photocopied, bound, and mailed directly. In those strips, suspended between anticipation and memory, the stories are about lives that intersect, friendships, love, out-of-town students, the disorientation before growing up, fanzines, and self-produced records. In the background, the quiet indolence of the provinces. That young comic artist became Alessandro Baronciani, now one of the leading figures in Italian authorial comics, and that project was "Una storia a fumetti".