38° Torino Film Festival

Immersing us in a sea of words and images, Al largo brings us into contact with the experience of suffering. Dissolving the polarity between egoism and altruism, taking care becomes a gesture which alone seems to resist in front of the excessive power of life. After De la mutabilité de toute chose et de la possibilité d’en changer certaines (2011), Variations ordinaires (2012) and Au-delà de l’un (2017), Anna Marziano returns to the Festival with a film inspired by the reading of Nietzsche and Donald Winnicott.

The pages of a twenty-year long diary bring to the fore memories, recollections, dreams and sensations of a long period linked to the illness and later to the death of the director’s mother. As in an uninterrupted dialogue, images, sounds, photographs, linked to the present by the voice-over, narrate the personal story of the relationship between mother and daughter through small “time capsules” rife with memories. At the same time, a second narrating voice reads the words of Roland Barthes in Journal de Deuil left as a testimony of his own mourning.

The “scattered factory” expands. This journey recounts how, among abandoned buildings, mines transformed into tourist attractions, factories in Eastern Europe that have been reconverted to produce Italian cars, and the transformation of industrial cities and towns such as Sesto San Giovanni (the former Stalingrad of Italy) and Lumezzane (the “workshop” city of the Brescia area). The places, the images, the sounds. The director takes note and recounts by blending telephone calls, conferences, poems, old movies, commercials on Yugoslavian TV, Russian ballets, experimental performances. One sole flow that expands into multiple senses and directions. Just like a factory.

Rome, 1968: at the pinnacle of his artistic career, the artist Pino Pascali was just over thirty years old when he died in a motorcycle accident. Fifty years later, the Pascali Museum at Polignano a Mare, in Apulia, Pino’s land of origin, buys and exhibits his work Cinque Bachi da Setola e un Bozzolo. Through photographs taken by Pino Musi and Pino Pascali, the story of a work of art returning to its origins is the opportunity to reflect on Pascali, in a narrative dimension in which space and time bend and disappear.

A hot summer in a working-class neighborhood in Bologna: the rhythm and repetition of silences, of afternoon grasshoppers, and ancient sounds accompany the desolation and the courage of the people who live there. Straddling visual essay and musical documentary, a humanist and amused gaze that uses summer swelter, the sun-drenched suburbs, and old songs to create a series of tragicomic notes on solitude.

After spending a few weeks in Morocco scouting locations and stories for a movie about urbanization and the territory, Elia Moutamid returns to Brescia – where he lives and where he moved with his family when he was a child – to continue the project. But the pandemic forces him to stay locked up at home and follow an autobiographical pathway: Kufid is the result of that pathway, a movie shot during the pandemic but not about it. And beyond the doubts and reflections raised by a virus that overwhelms families and habits, a single firm point emerges: “Insha’Allah” (if Allah wills).

For 15 years, the “gypsy camp” at Lungo Stura Lazio, in Turin (the so-called “Platz”), existed in Turin’s northern suburbs. It was one of the biggest shanty towns in western Europe. La versione di Jean is the story of a man who used his cell phone to film and record various moments of daily life at that camp, until it was razed to the ground. Now, in that large space that has remained empty after it was cleared out, his memories resurface.

In Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, every day for over two hundred years, divers have plunged from the Stari Most, the “old bridge,” which was built in the 16th century. The tradition is handed down from generation to generation and didn’t stop during the war, even though the bridge was destroyed in 1993. A few of the divers carry the signs of the conflict on their bodies and in their minds, while a young group, in search of the perfect form, think about the future. An intimate and exclusive view of the life of a group of men who embody the history and feelings of the population to which they belong.