Brocani conjures together all your favourite European cultural and historical myth figures in order to attack the centuries of ‘sublimation’ that have produced our cities and their inhabitants. The gang’s all here: Frankenstein’s monster gropes towards the awareness that his mind is a universe; Attila, naked on a white horse, liberates his people from their ignominy; the ultra-caustic Viva bemoans the frustrations of married life and drifts into the elegiac persona of the Bloody Countess Bathory; Louis Waldon is a hip American tourist searching for the (missing) Mona Lisa. The range is extraordinary, from stand-up Jewish comedy to a kind of flea-market expressionism. Brocani’s approach is contemplative rather than agitational, which confounds the impatient; Gavin Bryars’ lovely Terry Riley-esque score matches the ambience exactly.
Tag: ITALY
A man wearing a mask of King Kong walks through a maze unrolling a ball of thread. Franco Brocani renewes his interest in the dens of perdition providing a free vision of the classic myth of the Minotaur. Shot in an art gallery in Rome and adapted from a story by Jorge L. Borges.
Maledetti vi amerò is a bleak but also bitingly-humorous look at what happened to Italy during the absence of one young rebel. Svitol has been hiding out in South America. Then one day he gives up on his life in exile and decides to head back home. Everything has changed. The radical left is now in business or shooting up drugs, and Svitol finds he has no “home” left. Terrorists seem to set the stage for near anarchy and nothing is as he had imagined.
A film on the poet, writer and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini focusing on his brutal murder and on the judicial proceedings that followed. The case is reconstructed via the trial of Pino Pelosi, the street kid who was found guilty of the murder. The trial becomes a metaphor of the Italian society in the 1970s.
Intrigued by the mysterious, primitive, human-like creature captured on film roaming the wilds of Africa, Lord Carter organises a scientific expedition to the Dark Continent to find out if there is such a thing as a human ape. There, amid ferocious beasts and blood-thirsty cannibalistic tribes, the ambitious explorers find not one but two rare specimens: undefeated Karzan, the mighty lord of the jungle, and fierce Shiran, his untamed mate. However, capturing the wild couple is easier said than done, and before long, the white invaders get what’s coming to them. Will they manage to catch savage Karzan and wild Shiran and lock them in a zoo cage?
An Italian movie crew goes to London to see a very close friend of the director, Tilda Swinton, who leads them on the trail of an actual event that took place a few years before – about two teenagers who murdered a complete stranger simply to prove themselves that they had the courage to do it.
The history of the first victim of modern artillery and its moving agony, amidst conspiracies and betrayals of the powerful. Life and death of Giovanni De’ Medici, a young brave captain in the war of Charles V against the Pope, in the first half of 1500.
Intrigue and deceit in medieval Hungary, with spectacular choreography by Miklós Jancsó. Gáspár, the youngest scion of the ruling family, returns home from Italy and discovers he is destined to be crowned king. However, the path to the throne is convoluted and in the death dance around the court nobody can escape their fate. Ninetto Davoli, known from Pasolini films, also plays an important role alongside László Gálffi, while József Madaras and György Cserhalmi similarly excel in this carnival-like allegory mixed with pantomime.