Davide Manuli

When married British women Rose Arbuthnot and Lottie Wilkins decide to take a break from their respective spouses, they stay at a castle in Italy for a quiet holiday. Joining the ladies is Caroline Dester, a young socialite, and Mrs. Fisher, an older aristocrat. Liberated from their daily routines, the four women ease into life in rural Italy, and each finds herself transformed by the experience.

Arriving on a deserted beach in the Mediterranean sea, in a time and a place unspecified, Kaspar Hauser is forced to confront the evil of a Grand Duchess who feels threatened by the power she exercises over the community.

An ancient dying land is brought back to life by the primal force of a young mute girl, who witnesses the fatal clash between two fathers.

Teo, a student in Astrophysics, shares an apartment with his girlfriend, Carla, who is also a student. One evening, while he is absent-mindedly crossing the road, he is knocked down by a car. At the wheel of the car is Mavi, a girl originally from Spalato, who came to Italy with her father when she was a little girl. Teo is lying on the ground, injured, and Mavi helps him, before disappearing without a trace. The two characters meet again by chance some time later and a strong and deep bond forms between them.

Angelo is an orphan who grew up with a nomad woman. He reacts to his pain over the death of his best friend for overdose, thanks to the encounter with Serena. She survives being a prostitute, but she has not lost hope. Angelo moves along an axis of characters in a desolate and poetic day without end.

Freak and Jajà, like Vladimir and Estragon, are in a no man’s land, with no date or time. Earth is no longer inhabited by humans but a few strange survivors who appear from time to time. The two protagonists, strangers to each other, meet at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere.

Mental Masturbation, a Super 8 short imbued with a blessed soundtrack of trance music (an element that would be recurrent in all his latter films), was a point of start into what would be the most appreciated (and hated) element of Manuli’s cinema: The rescue of the absurdist to paint an atmosphere of freedom, in which music (in this case, electronic music) serves as the only link of meaningful communication between its characters, or between its protagonists and the settings of his films, the relation man-man and man-nature.

short film by Davide Manuli