A selection of short Italian documentaries that take us into unexpected stories through found footage.
Curated by Alessandro Del Re and Morena Faverin, Lago Film Fest
The focus is part of the Triangle Program project in cooperation with Vienna Shorts and Vilnius Short Film Festival.
From photography to stock footage, from home-movies to television documentation and the web, archival material has always represented an inexhaustible public source and a fundamental tool for investigating the past and reinterpreting the present. Over the years, found footage has become an essential starting point for the research of filmmakers who, thanks to the magic of cinema, bring attention back to forgotten and necessary stories or steal moments from the past to create new and unexpected narratives. The Program turns the spotlight on a new wave of promising young Italian filmmakers who, starting with sounds and archive images, catapult us into bold new visions.
The selection:
AFRICA BIANCA – THE IMPERIAL LULLABY
Filippo Foscarini, Marta Violante
Italy / 23′ / 2020 / Doc
BATTLEFIELD
Silvia Biagioni, Andrea Laudante
Italy / 10′ / 2020 / Doc
LUI E IO – HE AND I
Giulia Cosentino
Italy / 13′ / 2019 / Doc
L’INCANTO – ENCHANTMENT
Chiara Caterina
Italy / 20′ / 2021 / Doc
Films details
AFRICA BIANCA – THE IMPERIAL LULLABY
Filippo Foscarini, Marta Violante
Italy / 23′ / 2020 / Doc
SYNOPSIS
The Italian colonialism still remains shrouded in the shadows. Using the materiality of archival sounds and images, the film recounts the invasion of Ethiopia in 1936 through the school notebook of a small balilla.
Filippo Foscarini (b.1990) graduated from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Palermo after graduating in Comparative Literature. From September 2023, he received a scholarship at the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. He has made “Africa Bianca” (2020), “Late August” (2021) and “A Soft Hiss Of This World” (2022), presented at DocLisboa 2022 and Trieste Film Festival 2023.
Marta Violante (Milan, 1991) lives in Palermo and is part of the filmmakers collective La Bandita. She is mainly involved in editing and found footage research. She studied documentary cinema at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, graduated in Audiovisual Communication in Spain and lived several years in Mexico. She collaborated on the direction of the documentary Le Mura di Bergamo, in competition at the 73rd Berlin Film Festival.
Filippo Foscarini (b.1990) graduated from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Palermo after graduating in Comparative Literature. From September 2023, he received a scholarship at the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. He has made “Africa Bianca” (2020), “Late August” (2021) and “A Soft Hiss Of This World” (2022), presented at DocLisboa 2022 and Trieste Film Festival 2023.
Marta Violante (Milan, 1991) lives in Palermo and is part of the filmmakers collective La Bandita. She is mainly involved in editing and found footage research. She studied documentary cinema at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, graduated in Audiovisual Communication in Spain and lived several years in Mexico. She collaborated on the direction of the documentary Le Mura di Bergamo, in competition at the 73rd Berlin Film Festival.
BATTLEFIELD
Silvia Biagioni, Andrea Laudante
Italy / 10′ / 2020 / Doc
SYNOPSIS
Intimate, other, virginal, objectified, ethereal, fragmented: the female body mirrors a battlefield for all women that, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, claimed its re-appropriation.
Battlefield is a tribute to all second-wave feminist movements; through fragments of daily life and social battles, it reconstructs those key moments in our recent history. Sound and images give voice to the archives of Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico, in an imaginary journey between different representations of femininity of that time.
Silvia Biagioni is a filmmaker and editor based between London and Milan. She has specialized in documentaries and archive films, found footage, participatory projects and film essays and has worked on films for the BBC, Vice, ITV and Channel 4 – amongst others. Her first film “Nothing Essential Happens in the Absence of Noise” (2015) was produced in collaboration with the Berlin based collective, Praxis Records, and has been screened at festivals across Europe, US and Taiwan.
Andrea Laudante is an Italian composer of electroacoustic music and multi-instrumentalist. Andrea’s music has been presented in festivals such as Akousma (Paris), Totem Èlectroacoustique, CIM XXIII (Ancona), In-sonora (Madrid), Martini Elettrico (Bologna). and broadcasted Rai Radio 3, Radio France, Radio WDR3. Andrea has also been awarded the first prize of INA GRM Découvertes 2021.
Silvia Biagioni is a filmmaker and editor based between London and Milan. She has specialized in documentaries and archive films, found footage, participatory projects and film essays and has worked on films for the BBC, Vice, ITV and Channel 4 – amongst others. Her first film “Nothing Essential Happens in the Absence of Noise” (2015) was produced in collaboration with the Berlin based collective, Praxis Records, and has been screened at festivals across Europe, US and Taiwan.
Andrea Laudante is an Italian composer of electroacoustic music and multi-instrumentalist. Andrea’s music has been presented in festivals such as Akousma (Paris), Totem Èlectroacoustique, CIM XXIII (Ancona), In-sonora (Madrid), Martini Elettrico (Bologna). and broadcasted Rai Radio 3, Radio France, Radio WDR3. Andrea has also been awarded the first prize of INA GRM Découvertes 2021.
LUI E IO – HE AND I
Giulia Cosentino
Italy / 13′ / 2019 / Doc
SYNOPSIS
Lui e io tells the reflections of a woman in her role as wife and mother lived between imposition and choice. Through the shots of her husband that portray her, she reveals herself in opposition to the world of him, always militant far from home. A reworking of the personal feminine as a political act to tell that love is an act of acceptance of differences and that personal memories are part of collective history.
Giulia Cosentino was born in Catania in 1990. She studied cinema and visual arts at the universities of Roma Tre, Nova in Lisbon, Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris and Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. She teaches the ‘Film Reuse’ course at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia- Sede Sicilia, and is a founding member of Reframing Home Movies and the Riavvolte Archive. In 2022 she won the Solinas Prize for best screenplay for ‘Colonna Rotta’. Her films (Lui e io and Perché scappi?) have been screened at several international festivals and she is currently working on her new film Le prime volte.
L’INCANTO – ENCHANTMENT
Chiara Caterina
Italy / 20′ / 2021 / Doc
SYNOPSIS
The voices of five women gradually fill the sound space of the film, weaving a pattern: a tarot card reader; a woman surviving one of the most horrific cases of sexual violence and homicide in Italy in the 1970s; a woman accused of the homicide of four people; a woman who’s obsessed with the idea of death while another seeks an answer to violence through religious practice. These voices bring out, in different ways, the relationship to life through the discourse of death.
