Da Lontano

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".

Carmaux and Wan Stiller, Mimmo and Sussò fishermen from the Old City, are looking for the Lady of Ventimiglia, here Carmela. An elderly and visionary Morgan sent them among childhood memories, fears of new imprisonments and adverse destinies, chatter in an arcane and mysterious language. The (free) life of today's pirates in the beautiful city of Taranto. Inspired by Jolanda, the daughter of the Black Corsair by Emilio Salgari.

“Vaghe stelle” is a seven-chaptered film, conceived as a musical album and composed of seven movements, which can be watched singly (like songs), or in the established order (like a record) or also mixing the films creating new combinations or possible narrations.

A girl goes up a river from the mouth, backwards, perhaps in search of a place or fleeing from something... Among wolves and mysterious glances she will find someone who will give her refuge and who, in turn, will ask her for help...

The voices, faces and bodies of the students of the Liceo Artistico Mengaroni in Pesaro embody the characters of two novels by Cesare Pavese, La bella estate and Il diavolo in collina. Seventy years later, the "beautiful summers" of Ginia and Guido, Amelia and Poli, Oreste, Pieretto, are staged by contemporary bodies who read Pavese's words and discover the closeness of the themes addressed by the author to their own experience, feeling the emotions that the staging of some episodes of the two works arouses in them.

A day at the seaside, among fish, swimmers, trains and diving in search of something missing

"Dove Sono Stato" is a film that tells of the sudden disappearance of a man during a trip and of a friend who follows in his footsteps. All footage was filmed in Portugal in 1994; I wrote the text and edited the video in the early months of 2000 following obligatory passages, already existing faces and places to which I gave a role and a time that was foreign to them: unaware, and false, traveling companions.

A short, but white is the screen: and in the screen the shapes are formed by deforming themselves.

'Petite mémoire' tells of a forgotten woman's face and the attempt to shed light on the memory, to restore clear features to what is indistinct, but the closer one gets, the more the face vanishes, taken away by other images ready to reclaim the same attention. …and at the end of the journey, stopped in an empty station, one is left with the doubt that only one's own projections, or those of other travellers, have passed outside the window; that the treadmills of memory have deluded us again, us and our empty suitcases...