AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS
Best feature film, Milano Filmfestival, Italy 2003
Best documentary-fff, dokfest Munich, Germany 2003
nomination: Best diploma film, Babelsberger Medienpreise, Germany 2003
nomination: Best camera, femme totale, Germany 2003
SYNOPSIS
An associative journey in pictures: a rapprochement to Italy, the people who live there and the places where they live and work in the form of a documentary essay accompanied by Federico Fellini, and determined by personal memories and impressions during moments of encounter and discovery.
“When you shoot a film, you don’t really know what it is about. (…) despise the sickness of our age: the need for ideology, the addiction to false clarity. Everything is tried by the tribunal of reason which analyses, makes a diagnosis and prescribes the treatment for that which cannot be understood, for the unconscious, our “dark zone” that feeds on the confused, the unexpected, the changeable and makes us feel uncomfortable and afraid. And yet, in fact, this is an extraordinarily precious part of us; why do we want to eliminate it and mutilate ourselves?” Federico Fellini, 1984
ABOUT THE FILM
The film is a hymn to Italy, that seems to be vanished, that we’d think it’s lost. It brings on the yearning for this country and it’s people that we know from our memories and our phantasy.
This documentary essay sketches with love and being close by the protagonists a human kaleidoskop in which someone may think the people are moving out of Fellinis films. They are playing their roles on the stage of life: very touchy, sometimes funny, maybe ludicrous – but never ridiculous. They tell us in a very open manner about moving moments in their lives and the sense of being there. Always in the reality of this epoque and in the same way constantly in encounter with their own truth. They’re the true poets of every day life.
Federico Fellini in the Film: ” … Keep your ears and your heart open for something that has almost been forgotten … “
Outside in the the narrow, little streets there’s life. In the oldfashioned barbershop of ENRICO DEL GAUDIO there’s almost a sacral silence. If there wasn’t this metallic, meditative clatter of his pair of scissors. Then: waiting for hours for the next client. Enrico del Gaudio: “Monotony … means doing nothing, being helpless. At moments like this I feel useless. What am I doing now; what shall I do next? … Nothing … “.
CLAUDIO ALBANESE is sitting on his new shed sawing wood. On the countryside he his creating his new livelihood with 17 horses and 32 dogs. He always wanted to take his life in it’s own hands, doesn’t like regulations and gets new power out of the heavy blows life offers: “… Life is always a game. It really is. For me it’s a game of poker. … When you finally get up from the card table, you have either won – or you have lost. That’s life. There is no other explanation, that’s just the way it is. It’s a game … “. While the OLDER ONES OF HIS FAMILY starting to dance in front of the wooden house under the blue sky, the two ANGLER at Napolis docks enjoying their male friendship by putting the rutes into the water and having a sweet every now and then.
The 80 year-old female OLIVEGROWER in the Abruzzo mountains still climbs up a tree very easily and harvests the little green fruits. As every year. She has been born and raised up here, that’s what everybody wants from life, she says smiling into the camera.
” … It is as though you were to eat pasta with beans every day, pasta with beans or just pasta…You need variety! Older people can’t do it so often any more because … the metabolism slows down, and that makes everything slower.” Although the LEISURE-TIME-DANCER out of Rimini find out that while getting older the feeling of desire is getting lower – they still have a big love for life. They twist and shout until midnight …
… at the same time NUNCIA LAURINO is still sitting at the cash-register in her own coffeshop thinking about her life: ” … Home and housework. You don’t have any experience of life, of dealing with other people, of other countries, of the big wide world… Instead, all you have got is your home and your housework, your children and their nappies; nothing else. That’s the sum total of my life. Depressing…Perhaps there is no such thing as happiness … “. she assumes and is discharging into her melancholy. Most of all when she sings those traditional napolitanian songs …
LINA ZAVATTA reminds of an extincted reptile sitting in her little shanty in front of the children round-about thinking about the love of her life – it was in the circus where she met him 50 years ago …
And so on … At the end of the film, it’s already late in the evening, the barber closes his shop by means of a heavy roller blind and leaves the stage …
Some of the protagonists take the floor more often than others. Everything is very flowing. Like life is constantly in a flow. The film has been shot on S8mm colour and S16mm black&white film. The moving, coloured pictures alternate with the powerfull, silent uncoloured images. The music reminds of Nino Rota, the composer of many Fellini films and intensifies the impression that the people present themselves in an universal cosmos of a “Comédie Humaine” – easily to understand for everybody.
LINKS
PROTAGONISTS
Enrico del Gaudio, Nuncia Laurino, Claudio Albanese, Lina Zavatta, Beppo (Mauro Sergio), Carmela di Giorgio, Salvatore Perez, Pasquale Argentiere, Arnaldo Angelini
TEAM
S-16mm CAMERA Luigi Falorni S-8 MM CAMERA susan gluth CAMERA ASSISTANT Anne Bürger SET ORGANISATION Carmen Te EDITORS Nicole Fischer, susan gluth EDITING CONSULTANT Jean-Claude Piroué ORIGINAL SOUND Kristofer Harris, Christof Lemman, Nicole Fischer RE-RECORDING MIXER Gerhard Auer, Jan Bennert MUSIC Andreas Weidinger TITLE GRAPHICS Bernd Müller LABORATORY Arri, Sepp Reidinger COLOUR GRADING Mary-Ann Oteman FILMMATERIAL Eastman Kodak SUBTITLES Subs Kirsten Herfel ARTISTIC CONSULTANT Nicolas Humbert WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY susan gluth PRODUCER susan gluth PRODUCTION COMPANY Hochschule für Fernsehen & Film, München
CONTACT Hochschule für Fernsehen & Film, München, dep. documentaries
Bernd Eichinger Platz 1, 80333 Munich, Germany, info@hff-muc.de
