In the Penal Colony

A hundred years of images researched and found, Fragments of film, family reels, pixels. A martyr saint, a warrior. Saint Efisio, an icon who moves the people. A holiday, a rite which repeats outside of time and brings with it the masks of dominations past and present, of an island; Sardinia. What escapes? What remains? Question and answer is the foundation of editing And renews the past in another past. In this encounter of deferred glances, the holy day is renewed again in memory and in dream, far from known places.

A collective work achieved by dismantling and reshaping the artwork by artists Luca Carboni, Alberto Diana, Riccardo Giacconi, Alessandro Penta, Vittoria Soddu, and Carolina Valencia, realized for the “REMIX” project. The result is a new visionary, heterogeneous and highly contemporary artwork.

As autumn arrives, Sardinia’s coastlines empty out: the rough sea washes away the traces of mass tourism, while volunteers clean up what’s left.

Starting from the discovery of a propaganda film from 1927, L’Estate Silana, made when King Victor Emmanuel III visited Calabria, the film Sons of No-one focuses on the unused fragments in the film, and digs into the edges of the shots pointing a finger at how history, and cinema, is staged. The texts, from the book Calabria grande e amara by Leonida Repaci, seek in these reels what propaganda excluded and deliberately kept in the side-lines. Sons of No-one is a short film made during a workshop conducted by Gaetano Crivaro and Margherita Pisano for The Memories Film Fest, organized by the Cineteca della Calabria Association.

The twilight scenery of the desolate Calabrian countryside leads into the meanders of a lost time in which every search is in vain: this frustration is paradoxically the lifeblood that manages to transform Gaetano Crivaro's film into a ruthless interrogation of ourselves.