Lyon, 1943. A car driven by an SS soldier is transporting French prisoners to the prison of Montluc. One of them, Fontaine, to whom they forgot to put in handcuffs, jumps from the running car. He will be soon captured again, beaten, put in chains and locked in jail. Fontaine's charges are heavy ones. For four months, in the loneliness of his prison, he prepares a plan to es...
Shot in the head by a bullet during a police operation, Hoffmann, a young biologist, has lost his memory. He doesn't know who he is. He has to learn again to see, to listen, to feel, to walk, to speak. What really happened that night? Despite his sickness - or actually thanks to it - Hoffmann manages to break the vicious cycle of phantasy and speculation. Pretending to have ...
A couple of lovers lives together an entire century of life while objects, trends, movies at the movie theatre and architects follow one another in a slow but inexorable decline towards the horror. Their obsession with the octagonal knobs of the coffeemakers and with the anonymous design objects will accompany them along the passing by of the decades. Aging and gradual...
Jòsef, the main character, visits the sanatorium where his parents, he himself as a child, the emperor Francesco Giuseppe and other characters lived. The allegoric entrance to the building is the entrance to the world of fantasy, a dreamlike and labyrinthic dimension. In this strange sanatorium, time has stopped, or better, time has gone backwards. Here, Jòsef can explore th...
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.
A day with Ciro, a man from Centocelle (Rome) who has had a stand at the market for forty years and Priscilla, an Irish painter and aspiring musician with a passion for roses.
In Erik Gandini’s recent documentary The Swedish Theory of Love (2015) there is a character who stands out, the surgeon Erik Erichsen. This film is an intimate portrait of him and his wife Sennait. After serving 30 years in a Swedish hospital Dr Erichsen was fed up with all the bureaucracy and administration. He decided to move someplace where he could make a...
Silvano lives in Sottomarina, in the province of Venice. He is 40 years old, has a young, nice wife, a beautiful child and a comfortable house. For a living, he is a car thief. One late summer day, an old friend of his, Mario, who is back to the village after many years...
The intarsia panels in the choir of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore were designed by Lorenzo Lotto and realized by Giovan Francesco Capoferri between 1524 and 1537. The enigmatic depictions can be understood with the help of alchemic metaphors. Starting from the "Magnum Chaos", the initial gaping void, the Man tries to reach the Light of the Truth and the Abso...
The film, a montage comprising images of Cézanne's paintings, pictures of him at work and a conversation between the painter and a young admirer named Joachim Gasquet, offers a suggesting view on Cézanne's painting. It also includes film scenes from both Jean Renoir's "Madame Bovary" and the Straubs' "The Death of Empedocles".
