The Challenge

Daniele is a young man from Sant’Erasmo, an island on the edges of the Venice Lagoon. He lives on his wits, isolated even from his peer group who are busy exploring an existence of pleasure-seeking expressed in the cult of the barchino (motorboat). This obsession focuses on the building of ever more powerful engines to transform the little lagoon launches into dangerously fast racing boats. Daniele too dreams of a record-breaking barchino, one that will take him to the top of the leader board, but everything he does to further his dream and win respect from the others turns out to be tragically counterproductive. The decline that erodes the relationships, environment and habits of a rootless generation is observed from the timeless perspective of the Venetian landscape and its island outskirts: the point of no return is a foolish, vestigial tale of male initiation. Violent and destined to fail, it explodes dragging the ghost city along on a psychedelic shipwreck.

In an operating theatre in a hospital robotic surgery department, a journey through the human body is undertaken by a specialized robot named Da Vinci. The surgeon conducts the entire operation remotely, controlling the robot’s intricate movements with a joystick.

The film highlights the relationship between women’s growing social empowerment and the rise in sexual abuse by men – a trend that was the opposite of what was largely expected to happen. The film revolves around Marina Valcarenghi, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst with a forty-five-year career in clinical work that has allowed her to observe the persistence of women’s insecurity, despite the economic and social independence they have gradually achieved, and understand why. Valcarenghi was the first to introduce psychoanalysis in prisons, starting with the Opera and Bollate penitentiaries. For twelve years she worked with male inmates held in solitary confinement; most of them had been convicted of sexual violence.

A forensic study of Milano’s famous football stadium that builds an increasingly intense anticipation and suspense as game-time approaches. San Siro is an episode of the series The Roots of Violence which is also composed by: San Vittore (2018) and San Giorgio (2019)

A group of six scuba divers that specialize in deep underwater operations lives for a period of three weeks at the bottom of the ocean, conducting work on board of the platform Luna.

At dawn, goats leap about in a run-down graveyard while late-night dancers welcome the morning sun. In a remote Haitian village there is a dance with slaves and masters: the whipping zombie ritual. To trance-inducing music played by rara bands, men whip and fight until they die and are reborn in the infinite cycle.

Monte Bettogli, Carrara: in the marble quarries men and machines dig the mountain. The Chief manages, coordinates and guides quarrymen and heavyduty machines using a language consisting solely of gestures and signs. Conducting his dangerous and sublime orchestra against the backdrop of the sheer slopes and peaks of the Apuane Alps, the Chief works in total noise, which creates a paradoxical silence.

Children’s drawings made during complicated visits to their parents. For them San Vittore is a castle. San Vittore is an episode of the series The Roots of Violence which is also composed by: San Siro (2014) San Giorgio (2019)

Séance is a meeting between the psychologist Albània Tomassini and Carlo Mollino, dead in 1972. Fulvio Ferrari, tenant of Casa Mollino, serves the dinner to the two guests, one is visible and one is invisible. Ancarani shoots the unique conversation where Mollino speaks about the sense and the aim of his passed life and his new direction towards perfection, which is possible only in other dimensions.