Sara Fgaier

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

The armies of Fascist Italy conquered Addis Ababa, capital of Abyssinia, in May 1936, thus culminating the African colonial adventure of the ruthless dictator Benito Mussolini, by then lord of Libya, Eritrea and Somalia; a bloody and tragic story told through the naive drawings of Pietro Dall'Igna, an Italian schoolboy born in 1925.

Upon his release from prison, an ex-convict returns to his beloved city of Genoa, and to his lover.

Pulcinella, a foolish servant, is sent from the depths of Mt. Vesuvius to present-day Campania to grant the last wish of poor shepherd Tommaso, who spent his whole life looking after a crumbling Bourbon estate: his mission is to save a young buffalo named Sarchiapone. Pulcinella takes the buffalo north and the two servants, man and beast, travel through a beautiful and lost Italy.

The Istituto Luce turned ninety in 2014, its decades-long history intertwined with that of Italy itself, through cinema and that unique treasure trove of images known to all as the Luce Archives. To celebrate its anniversary, some of the most acclaimed rising filmmakers in Italy were invited to make a small film, with each director selecting ten minutes of footage from the archives, out of the thousands of hours of footage to be found there. The result is an album full of different narratives.

Gian, a 65-year-old ethnomusicology professor, fights the darkness caused by the sudden onset of amnesia. Flashes of the past, that blend with hazy archive footage, haunt his mind like a phantasmagoria of images. Despairing, Gian tries to end things, but he fails. In the aftermath, Miriam, the daughter he does not recognize, moves into his apartment with her son Elyas. She helps him find a diary written into his twenties that revolves around Leila, a girl with whom he discovers love in the space of one night. This emotion exacerbates Gian’s pain but pushes him to recover his memory.

A documentary about the Armenian avant-garde filmmaker, Artavazd Pelešjan.

In the first few months of 2020, huge swathes of Northern Italy were hit by a new virus. The town of Bergamo and its province was to become the epicentre of this pandemic.

In the aftermath of Stalin’s death, three Italian communists engage in a trip to the Soviet Union to challenge their utopia with an 8mm camera. In 1957, Sauro, Luigi and Enzo all live in Alfonsine, a small town in Italy ruled like a miniature Soviet Union by the Italian Communist Party. As many communists in the West, they dream of the Soviet Union, and hope for the great Revolution. But with the wind of reform and self-criticism blowing through the Eastern Bloc after the death of Stalin the image of the Soviet Union as the workers’ paradise begins to crumble. They therefore decide to travel to the USSR to find out what is true and what is false in this supposed land of milk and honey. They film their entire journey with their 8mm camera. Through this invaluable personal archive, our film tells the hopes, disappointments and challenges of three young men faced with the reality of what seemed to be a utopia come true.

A personal diary that also acts as a sentimental journey. Will the man-child that emerges from behind the camera be able to glimpse something of himself before growing to maturity? One of Enrico Maisto’s most intimate and enlightening films.

For the 90th anniversary of the Istituto Luce, ten new-generation filmmakers were invited to dig into the archives of the famous institute. Pietro Marcello and Sara Fgaier decided to pay tribute to the rural world of this “lost and beautiful” Italy, accompanying their images with excerpts from Carlo Levi’s book, Un volto che ci somiglia (1960).

Liguria is an impervious region, caught between the mountains and the sea. A network of deep valleys carved by streams flowing onto rocky coasts. Steep slopes collapse and wash out into the water. The Landslide has always permeated this territory; it is its natural geological - and ontological - conformation. Those who live here tenaciously oppose the slipping away of the soil, working in a way that takes the form of care, but also of forcing the balance. Two forces that meet and shape each other: one pulling down, the other clinging and trying to resist. Terracing after terracing, stone after stone, the landscape becomes an immense deposit of fatigue: human fatigue, animal fatigue, the fatigue of the roots that dig up the arid earth and break the walls, or hold them together; the fatigue of the stone, crushed between meanders and formations destined for infinite reshuffling.

A woman gives voice to a few collected fragments of her life on the shores of Sardinia.