The summer has just started and a family run circus travels adrift in the region of the Sertão. They don't have any means of transportation so every time they have to move, they hire a truck to transport all the things which were inside the tent. Their arrival to a new city is announced only by radio, the only mean of communication which is available in such isola...
A reflection on the human being, on the human condition. The city of Tallinn, capital of Estonia, offers the rare possibility of observing freely, without tricks of the eye nor violence. People welcome the watching eye naturally, they do not feel offended nor do they withdraw, they participate willingly, discreetly. In every place: in bars, on streetcars, along the street. T...
One day, when he was only a child, the director found in his grandparents' house an incomplete series of postcards with pictures of his family's village. These six postcards showed the events that took place in that small village, near the Spanish border, when the Republicans, escaping from the Francoist Spain, arrived to France at the end of Spanish war, in 1939. Twenty yea...
This documentary tells the story of a family. Everything revolves around the extraordinary Jewish woman Lisa Ghelfenbein, born in Odessa in 1887, who moved to Italy in the begin of the XX century to study medicine in Turin. She meets the man who will become her husband and moves to Bergamo, where she will raise a numerous family. During the period of the Italian Racial Laws,...
Interviews to different women who are asked to answer two questions: "What do you have in common with your mother? What does your mother have in common with you?" Women who tell about the deepest blood tie, the ancestral and biological bond.
The demolition of an old factory in the outskirts of Bergamo brings back to light the story of a workers' victory. In 1974, in the middle of an economic crisis, Lastex Yarn fired half of its workers. The factory is occupied and after months of protest, the workers show that the crisis is only a pretext to close and move the production lines to Malaysia, where the man pow...
"I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you", said Paul Cézanne. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze considered Cézanne Straub's teacher. Fifteen years after the extraordinary Cézanneìs death, the painter is the main subject of the movie in which he lives again through the words of the young poet Joachim Gasquet during a visit at Louvre. Jean-Marie Straub and Daniè...
The City of Silence is the psychiatric hospital of Treviso. Old abandoned structures, scraped walls, walled up windows. A nurse tells about the methods used in the past and the dramatic reactions of the patients. Some written patients' testimonies found in the hospital contribute to portrait the atmosphere of this place, where thousands of patients have lived.
Flor da Baixa is an old pension with empty windows or an echo, a cross reference to an image, dreamt or seen by somebody else. Flor da Baixa is a woman who has been waiting and waited forever... is a border line, where everything has to be defined and can change.
The relationship between Livorno and Piero Ciampi, a forgotten and disregarded artist, poet and songwriter who was always angry because anarchist and communist. The "Livorness" of the artist is told by the ones who have memory of his peculiar disenchanted irony which is perfectly summed up in one of his sentence: "I am the greatest, because I can get up to 300...