Noi come Franco e Ciccio

The program consists of clips featuring interviews conducted by the two directors with alienated, crazy, and squalid characters against the backdrop of a desolate Sicily. A characteristic feature is the black and white footage. The subjects are all strictly male: there is no place for femininity in absolute squalor and desolation.

Palermo, Sicily, Italy, 2017. Twenty-five years after the murders of anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone, on May 23, 1992, and Paolo Borsellino, on July 19, 1992; and on the occasion of the tributes held in memory of both heroes, skeptical photographer Letizia Battaglia, chronicler of their titanic combat, criticizes the opportunism of shady characters who, like businessman Ciccio Mira, profit from the commemoration of both tragedies.

“Being born in Palermo is a kind of punishment, but I’ve never left because it would feel like betrayal. Moreover, I can’t imagine Cinico Tv in any other place in the world.” To Franco Maresco, a brilliant, solitary director from Palermo, his city was the stage of a surreal comedy of rampant decay just as the Mafia was renegotiating the division of power and influence in the emerging Second Republic. Ruins, trash, scraps, underwear, flatulence and burping raided the TV screen at dinnertime in Italian homes in the spring of 1992, sparking hostile cultural debates about the limits of trash and the aesthetics of ugliness, the sense of post-history and post-humanity

The Italian duo Ciprì & Maresco, known to be cynical deconstructionists, weave a fascinating film around memories of a decadent Sicily. Ruins, memories of ruins - memories are ruins. This thoroughly surrealist piece unfolds like a dream, with no clear direction but the haunting feeling of familiarity and the ready acceptance of otherness as oneness.

Ciprì and Maresco are fierce critics of post-modern society. They bear witness to the colonization of the imagination attributable in part to the omnipresence of mass communications and the globalization of neo-capitalist values. Their works, scatological in the literal but especially in the metaphorical and etiological sense, denounce social institutions and practices thought to be at the root of injustice, inequality and criminality.

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

In relation to some of Pasolini's visits to Palermo for this last film, in 2000 Ciprì and Maresco shot Arruso, which begins with a phrase by Pasolini ("I banished the word hope from my vocabulary") and consists of imaginary interviews with some local characters who are presumed to have had homosexual relationships with the director. The two record the testimonies, sometimes affectionate others less, of those who had the opportunity to meet him and know the trends on the occasion of that trip.

Franco Maresco celebrates the heritage of Pier Paolo Pasolini on the 99th anniversary of his birth through a series of exchanges with renowned intellectuals which were involved or influenced by his works and ideas.