Nisimazine Venice 28th August- 7th September 2013
Sacro Gra Madness will do us apart Gianfranco Rosi
4
picture of the day
Editorial Mirona Nicola (Romania)
Some are complaining that the festival’s 70th edition, as much as it is an important anniversary, it does not really mark a peak in its history. Selection decisions are questioned, as the awards will surely be soon. Talk of the future of the festival veers into talk about the future of festivals- of how their role has changed, whether they are going in the right direction, and, if not, what can be done to steer their course. The truth is, that the lager discussion should probably be about cinema as a whole- as an art and an industry. Because, after all, a selection is done based on submissions, on the films that are offered out there. Furthermore, festivals are opening up to the public. It might actually be that the vice versa is also true- a larger audience is becoming interested in festivals, beyond the regular film critics and star-spotting journalists. And in an insecure economic context that pushes for self-sufficiency, catering to the ticket-payers surely becomes a priority. While the authority of the festival(s) as institutions is debated, the upside is that festivals are more welcoming to different types of filmmaking. And, in all honesty, while the average of masterpieces per square meter was not particularly high for this edition of the Venice film festival, the eye had plenty to wonder on. Our eye, in particular, wonders today on a special piece of documentary filmmaking, Sacro GRA. Not only did we review the film, but we also interviewed the director to better understand how he approached his characters, the inhabitants of the ring road of Rome. Just as Sacro GRA immersed into people’s lives, Till Madness Do Us Part immerses into the minds of those who accept the challenge of a 227 minutes documentary shot in a prison quarter. With this we say ciao to Venice. By the time they finish storing the red carpet, we’ll be ready to guide you through the Orizzonti section in our upcoming e-book.
NISIMAZINE VENICE
28th August- 7th September 2013 /# 4 A magazine published by NISI MASA in the framework of a film journalism workshop for young Europeans.
EDITORIAL STAFF
Director Fernando Vasquez Coordinator Mirona Nicola Layout Lucía Ros Photography Valentina Calà
CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE
Yuri Lavecchia, Nino Kovačić, Mirona Nicola
NISI MASA
99, rue du Faubourg Saint-Dénis 75010, Paris, France Phone: +33 (0)1 48 01 65 31 europe@nisimasa.com www.nisimasa.com
reviews Sacro Gra
Gianfranco Rosi (Italy) – Official Competition
Gra is the largest italian ring road, situated in Rome’s belt and built in the years of the economic boom. An outskirts place, far from the postcard image, an infrastructure of connection and therefore a transition zone. The landscape architect Nicolò Bassetti was attracted to the idea of dwelling in the surrounding areas of this asphalt Giant, and after a year of wanders he decided to walk it in solitude. Years later, Gianfranco Rosi accepted the challenge for a documentary based on that experience. Sacro Gra arises from an explorative course to an unknown place, hidden, even invisible. A place yet to be determined, that the author decided to map, precisely through the research of landscapes, meetings, stories and views of the world. Sacro Gra is essentially the presentation of a series of different characters who live in the surrounding areas, all of them carriers of their own identity: the paramedic working in the ambulance with his sensibility towards his mother; the fisherman of eels with a philosopher’s wisdom: the nobleman and his daughter and their conversation about everything; the botanist armed by audiorecorder and poisons; the cigar-smoking prince who transform his castle in a B&B; the actor of photoromance; and the prostitutes. Meticulous workers, eccentric thinkers, careful observers, just to quote some, all of them marginal inhabitants, yet so peculiar. What unites them is a strong attribution of identity, which is the main intention of Rosi’s work: linking together a subtle and truly funny portrait of the locals living next to GRA. A work of extreme synthesis is precisely his declared modus operandi and this can be seen uncommon for a documentary, in addition
to the fact that the camera work seems to play with different styles and the text present some allusions of “otherness”. Emblematic in this sense are the scenes of conversations between the nobleman and his daughter: with the fix point of view from outside and the angle from the top, as if we assist a tv sketches throung the (in)discreet eye of a surveillance camera, while so different in the scenes with the paramedic, where there is a sense of proximity. The discourse on identity contextualized in this era of high de-personalization and the allusions on alienation can be probably add a point of this work, but Sacro Gra poses also some interesting questions linked to the documentary approach, going far beyond the excedeed blurred borders with fiction. What emerges is a work surely worthy of consideration, able to confirm urgencies of the contemporary new approach of “cinema of the real”. by Yuri Lavecchia (Italy) to the ones outside the prison gates. Also, the voyeuristic gaze of the camera stresses out the prisoners’ lack of privacy, filming them as they, for instance, urinate. Yet, the film is not a presentation of random episodes, but focuses on certain captives, and we can see variations of inmates’ personalities. While depicting boredom, small conflicts and neurotic gestures in details, patience is required to gain understanding of the environment which, as one inmate stated: “makes you seriously ill”.
Till madness do us apart
Wang Bing (China) - Out of Competition
A four-hour documentary about life inside a Chinese mental asylum doesn’t sound like a particularly tempting choice for Saturday night out with your loved one. And it isn’t. However, the new film by Wang Bing, who won last year’s Orrizonti laureate with Three sisters, is quite an intriguing piece. The filming method of Till madness do us part is very simple: turn on the camera and follow people around the prison. We watch their dummying routine, time spent mostly in bed or watching TV in-between receiving medicine or food, trivial and repetitive actions, such as walking in circles through the halls; when they interact or simply wonder around alone, aimlessly. In quarrels over beds and food we can read out power relations between them that seem no different
Wang Bing doesn’t interfere in the situations but sets up the position of a witness, both for himself and the audience. His genuine interest for the lives of the inmates, without passing judgement on them, is the films’ strong point. This stand promotes a certain dignity of the social outcasts: naming them, not treating them as patients thus not finding them ill personalities, or acquiring a ‘clinical’ point of view, but rather paying close attention to their everyday. This look inside a psychiatric institution reveals the nature of biopolitical type of institutions. The film itself doesn’t only give you insight into the conditions, but completely draws you into its obscure world. By throwing away prejudices and once “inside” this disturbing world, your senses cut down the four hour duration as you try to understand the rules of this strange reality, going on simultaneously with our lives on the ‘outside’. It can be considered as system critique by only depicting the conditions as they are. Much is said when knowing that Wang Bing’s films do not get legally distributed in China by Nino Kovačić (Croatia)
interview “Saturn ring” around the City, and this elevated outside its funtionality. The ring is part of the planet but it’s not as well... and, at the end of the film there’s a tv meantioning the presence of aliens, so I wanted to transmit this feeling of alienation and actually this is real and I used it in a dramatic way.
Gianfranco Rosi Director of ‘Sacro Gra’ (Italy) - Official Selection
Gianfranco Rosi was the big winner at this year´s Venice Film Festival. We were lucky enough to be able to sit down with him before he received the Golden Lion in order to find out more about his impressive documentary. What does the Gra represent in the film? In the idea of the film, the GRA is a perfect circle around Rome, it´s like a wall, anywhere you have to go you have to go accross the GRA. In a sense, GRA is Rome but for me it has a symbolic meaning, representing the “space of mind”, to elevated it to a different dimension. And Rome becomes invisible in my film. My aim was to “open the circle”, as imagery spaces.
The sense of humor and the eccentric characters remind the sensitivity of Fellini: is he an important reference for you? Oh...Fellini is untouchable! Actually, no, I’ve never thought about him. About the eccentricy. I would say, that’s Italy! But I didn’t want to shot Italy, but something else. That’s actually one thing that goes back to Fellini: if you take the international version of Fellini’s Rome you can hear the GRA as described as a
Can you say something about the peculiarity of the characters and how you met them? It seems you were lucky to meet the actor of photoromance, for instance! I couldn’t even know he could exist! Well, I met Gaetano through friends of mine that took me to this castle where he shot photoromances in front of the GRA. The bed&breakfast was my headquarters for 6 mounths. I was impressed with these people. And that’s exacly how I choose my stories. I fell in love with them. I spent one year without shooting them, just filming backgrounds and landscapes, then I started meeting people and then I decided four or five people to work with. The last one was the Palmologist. For three years I wasn’t able to film him, also because he is a complex character, but when one day he called me talking me about the disaster of the bugs I realized that was the right time. In a sense, your film brings inside the spirit of a road movie, as the nature of travelling for discover... Travel is a sense of adventure: when I start a film I usually don’t know when I’ll end it, so each film takes me several years, that’s why my filmography counts few films. The actors hadn’t seen the film before the premiere here in Venice: how did they perceive themselves on the screen? They loved themselves in the film. They like the way they come out in the movie. And they are like that in real life, I didn’t add anything to their characterization. Where do you go next? I want to teach for another year. I would love to work in different school and working with kids. It gives me energy, working on their project and forget about my things. And maybe then falling in love with another idea.. Interview by Yuri Lavecchia (Italy))