Ellis Donda
Directing
Biography
A very polemic student of Roberto Rossellini and a fan of Jean-Marie Straub's films, a fine experimenter, a lover of poetry, Ellis Donda worked - throughout the 70s and 80s - within a network of film critics, filmmakers, actors, avant-garde poets, public television producers and publishers. During his stay in Paris in the 70s, he spent time with Jacques Lacan and recorded the last interview with Roland Barthes. Long forgotten, his work is now subject to a new rediscovery by Italian curators and journalists.
Known For
A three-episode adaptation of Goethe's novel.
Elective Affinities
Made for Italian national television, Ellis Donda’s Il Corpo Rubato (The Stolen Body) is an experimental documentary on psychoanalisis in 70s/80s Italy, its analytical practices and forms of suggestion.
The Stolen Body
A three-episode adaptation of Goethe's novel.
Le affinità elettive
Engel und Puppe is the first film by Italian filmmaker and writer Ellis Donda. Screened at Oberhausen in 1975, Engel und Puppe is a political adaptation of some lines from Rilke's Duino Elegies, featuring the French poet Jacqueline Risset and a young Rossella Or (soon to become an avant-garde theatre actress).
Engel und Puppe
A workshop film made with a group of students of the Pietro Zorutti School in Palmanova, Esercizi di Cinema is an experimental adaptation of Raymond Queneau's book Exercises in Style.
Cinema Exercises
An essay film about Jean-Paul Sartre and the French Existentialists, featuring Roland Barthes' last interview.
Paris '50 - Existence imagined
A film by Ellis Donda.
Non vado a scuola
An experimental interpretation of Joycean epiphanies.
Other Epiphanies
A film by Ellis Donda.