Pierino Aceti is a man of fixed habits, a film lover, and is currently retired after a white-collar life.
For one year, for exactly fifty two Thursdays, the director went to visit Mr- Aceti’s at his house from 10.30 to 11.30 am. Every meeting revolved around one question: “what did you do this week?”.
The rigorous organisational schedule of Pierino’s days, his relentless ability to classify and remember things and details about films and life, to fragment time in meticulous and measurable events emerges during the formal agreement.
For a whole year, every Thursday morning, I went to visit Mr Aceti at his house.
As in all my previous works, strongly characterised by a stylistic and structural rigour, in Pierino I used a narrative storytelling device where the limit is a fundamental part of the film itself. Only this time private life and filming have undergone a substantial fusion: the film follows the protagonist’s life’s rhythm and the slow passing of time during the agreement made with Mr Aceti, in a timeframe that is as important as the main character.
This film, entirely shot in VHS with an old camera that doesn’t have a battery and thus needs to remain plugged into the socket outlet in order to function, is part of my project of a “domestic trilogy”. The three works are to be completely shot in small domestic environments in three different formats. Dulcinea in 16mm, Pierino in VHS, and The House of Love in the digital format.
The choice of the analogue shooting format for Pierino is an homage to Mr Aceti’s cinephile nature, that led him to gather a wide collection of arthouse VHS films. The film couldn’t have been shot in any other format in order to achieve a coherent fusion between shape and content.
