In His Bold Gaze

An unusual bandit trio spends autumn in a village by Lake Maggiore. In their holiday apartment they create a parallel world, which little reflects their surroundings. As the pressures of the outside world begin to weigh in on them, they kidnap a tourist in order to give their lives a purpose.

A hungry heart, a celebration of the body, both exposed and concealed at the same time, like baroque paintings: guilty, ashamed or further alienated from our voyeur gaze. A secret dividing the actors and their scenic world from the public who has come to witness it; an episodic narration around what is unutterable; two friends travelling in the same boat and playing lustful and sadistic games. The characters in Heart of Hunger can act, feel and experiment, but they cannot testify as to the relationships that determine them. They lose each other, they find each other; the heart is a lonesome hunter.

16th century: After a period overseas in the Antarctic France, Jean Aurand finds refuge as a servant in the house of French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, where a series of fantastical events change the lives of these two men forever.

When the filmmaker receives his first video camera at 13 years-old, he begins to film his family during their holidays. Together with his stepmother, bonding over their shared feeling of neglect, he starts plotting the murder of his father. Stumbling upon this material more than a decade later, Zanotta playfully revisits and rehashes this hidden childhood into a found-footage genre tale, proudly showing both the crime they commit and the genesis of his love for cinema.

“Quintal" is the accidental remake of the1959 short-film, Pátio by Glauber Rocha. Here, a new narrative is composed; sometimes in conjunction, sometimes in disjunction, with the original mise-en-scène. The viewer sees a man and a woman who have been thrown into a yard. The two characters develop slowly; they move away from each other, they look at each other. A cruel and obsessive game is played.