Rä di Martino

Once upon a time there was a garden, a refuge, a safe haven - 'The Garden of the Finzi Continis'. It came to life in Giorgio Bassani's 1962 semi-autobiographical novel recounting an unfulfilled love story between two young Jews in Ferrara, while fascism was raging in Italy in the late 1930's. In 1972, Vittorio De Sica's film adaptation of the book won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Since then, the fictional space of the garden became so tangible that people from all over the world come to Ferrara to look for it. Fifty years after winning the Oscar, reality and fiction come together once more, as we walk through an imaginary garden and bring to life the book, its author, its main protagonists, history, love, friendships and betrayals.

A small film crew is wandering about Marrakesh and the surrounding desert. They are looking for locations for the remake of an American film in which a man swims his way home, passing through the houses and pools that he finds along the route. Corrado is the stand in used to test the shots, locations and the swimming pools in which the lead will be filmed. While we watch his attempts to get into the part, the real actors and a real crew burst onto the scene, on a set in which no one is in the right place. A film with a crisis of identity, in a surreal search for itself.

The artist Rä di Martino celebrates MAS, Rome's historic "people's warehouses," with a documentary that blurs the lines between reality and fiction.