Open Roads 2013: HANDMADE CINEMA--Guido Torlonia's feast of movie memorabilia

For those of you who appreciated last year's look at the work of famed Italian production designer Dante Ferretti (above, left), I suspect you'll find this year's documentary nod to Italian cinema history even more of a treat. In it we see not just Ferretti and his oft-times collaborator Francesca Lo Schiavo (above, right), but so many of the amazing artisans (or let's just call them "artists," as Signore Ferretti politely points out) who do the wonderful carpentry, sculpture, costumes, furniture, millinery work and so much more that have gone into great Italian cinema down the decades -- and is still going on, or maybe barely hanging on. But it's there. And now, with this terrific little film, we're made aware.

Here we meet everyone from the hat- and wig-makers (above) to the jewelers and each is as fascinating, fun and charming as you could want. We watch them work and see some of their hits from ages (and films) past. For those of us of a certain age, this is spectacular and highly nostalgic. If names like Piero Tosi, Maurizio Millenotti and Gabriella Pescucci don't immediately ring a bell, they will once you've viewed this film.

We learn about Sophia Loren's famous wigs, watch a father and son (above) grow annoyed with each other (but keep it all under wraps), and learn that the folk who build the sets are indeed actual furniture makers, carpenters and construction people who know what they are doing -- and do it right.

The costumes from The Leopard?  They're here, all right. The hats worn by Silvana Mangano in  Death in Venice?  Ah, yes! And we're told about and see the paintings of the recreated Sistine Chapel from the half-century-old Agony and the Ecstasy.

The documentary is a wonderful paean to the hand-crafters who have made Italian cinema the wonder that it is. As someone notes, during the course of the film, "If you want to invest in Italy, invest in the crafts!" With a fine narration by Chiara Mastroianni, who tells us lovingly about visiting the sets on which her famous father labored, the film works its magic doubly. And the ending, with Chiara as a little girl, is simply exquisite, enchanting.

Handmade Cinema, directed by Guido Torlonia (shown at right) and written by Torlonia and Laura Delli Colli, runs just 52 minutes and plays twice at Open Roads in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center: on Friday, June 7, at 3:45 and again Sunday, June 9, also at 3:45. On the program with this documentary is another doc -- The Rescue, by Giovanna Taviani (click and scroll down)-- which I have not seen but will during its public screenings at Open Roads, so I will report on it at that time.  To view the entire Open Roads program, click here.

MOUTH OF THE WOLF: Two years later, a great documentary finally gets its day in the (American) sun

TrustMovies covered the film below as part of the FSLC's annual Open Roads festival in 2010. As this wonderful documentary opens today at MoMA, here's that short review again, and updated....

THE MOUTH OF THE WOLF (La bocca del lupo), walked off with Italy's Best Documentary award at the Donatellos two years ago. I don't know what the competition offered, but it is hard to imagine that anything could have legitimately bettered this film. As strange, poetic and beautiful -- as well as crass and prosaic -- as any documentary I've seen in some time, the movie, from Pietro Marcello (shown below), is a wonderful, moving surprise. It sneaks up on you; for awhile you will not even know what it is really about.

A man moves through landscapes, a city and time, and the film also moves back and forth, too, as it combines words, images, voices, music, sound (the lack of ambient sound, in particular, is very strange) and finally character -- two fascinating examples of this -- to create a rough kind of poetry.  The experience of simply sitting quietly and letting this film flow over you is such a unique one that I hesitate to say much more about it.  Except that it does involve prison, and a man (Enzo, shown below and on poster, above) whose dark eyes, thick mustache, high cheekbones and sunken cheeks may remind you a bit of Pierre Clementi. His inamorata, Mary, is something else, as well.

A kind of mosaic of a city, its people, the past and present, and "unknown desires, forbidden remembrances of a lost world."  And finally, everyone's dream: "a country house in which to live quietly, hugging each other and waiting for old age." The Mouth of the Wolf is strange art indeed, and we are lucky to have the chance to see it in a theatrical release. It will play for one week, beginning today August 4, at MoMA in New York City. Click here for screenings and tickets. Doc lovers: don't let this one get past you.

Third New York Documentary Film Fest – Festival dei Popoli opens at AFA

This Wednesday marks the opening of the third edition of the New York Documentary Film Festival – Festival dei Popoli, running through Sunday, May 30, at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan.  Part of an ongoing project of the Festival dei Popoli, based in Florence, Italy, this is the oldest International Documentary Film Festival in Europe, aiming of late toward broadening the audience for its archival footage, as well as Italian documentaries in general.

This year's festival opens with a tribute to the award-winning Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi: the U.S. premiere of Below Sea Level (2008), a nearly two-hour-long intimate portrait of a commune of outcasts living in the middle of the desert about 200 miles southeast of Los Angeles. This multi-award-winning documentary received the Venice Horizons Documentary Prize. Director Rossi will be present for the screening.

Below Sea Level is one of those documentaries that offer no explanation nor exposition but simply give you "life lived." In a revolving series of looks at the denizens of this odd "community," some themes do emerge -- among them hair (of the head, on the face, even a wig) as a kind of fortress/defense against the world.  These sad people, about whom, by the end of the film, we have learned rather a lot, become unforgettable, and where and how they live seem strangely memorable, too.  This is certainly up there with the best of documentaries; its Venice "win" seems no surprise.

Also among the newer offerings are two other docs that seem to express this "life lived" theme. One of these is part of the Italian Chronicles section that this year focuses on the work of Alessandro Rossetto: Bibione Bye Bye One, an alternately lustrous and grainy black-and-white, 75-minute film from 1988 that focuses on Bibione, a town on the Adriatic Sea, located 60 miles north of Venice.  The filmmaker begins by showing us an old man fishing (somewhere near Bibione, I suppose), and then shifts to the resort town for a look at the many different inhabitants and tourists who come there. 

We're at the beach; in a bizarre pet shop offering snakes and crocodiles; with an old women and her dancing, dressed-up doggie.  The denizens often talk of the old days (and plenty of other things) as they amuse themselves.  If the movie seems to go nowhere in particular, we've enjoy the non-ride -- and learn some interesting things along the way.

The last film I viewed is part of the Special Event section, sponsored by New York Women in Film & Television: ABC Colombia, by Enrica Colusso (Italy/France, 2006, 88 minutes), at the screening of which the director will appear in-person. A look at a small rural community in a part of Colombia entirely controlled by paramilitary forces, the film brings us village life via the the eyes (and mouths) of the children, their school-teacher (shown at bottom) and a parent or two.  Mostly though it's the kids (like the one shown above) who speak, and what they tell us is horrible.

I don't recall many other films as  upsetting as this one, in which the beauty of the countryside (below) and the village is totally offset by what we hear: Children forced first into cocoa-growing, then as they age, having the choice of joining either the military or the para-military, who, of course, end up killing one another.  Listen to the children singing as they work about becoming a big Mafioso,-- "bigger than Escobar!" -- and be utterly disheartened.  Along the way there are scenes of the kids crushing cocoa leaves under feet in a strange little dance, playing with toy weapons made out of carved wood (above).  Soon after hearing one young man talk of gutting and carving up dead bodies so as to be able to bury then more quickly and efficiently, my screener began to pixilate and then finally refused to go any further.  Though I missed the final ten minutes of this documentary, I feel as though I may have been spared the worst of it.  This is one utterly gorgeous and absolutely depressing film.  Yet Ms. Colusso is to be congratulated for risking her life to make it, allowing us to see and hear things as they are in this particular part of Colombia.

While the above three films are all that TrustMovies had time to view prior to the five-day program, there will also be a multi-film retrospective under the title of  The Feeling of Being There (1958-1965): Seven Years of Documentary Cinema which will feature four programs of auteur documentaries, with a total of eighteen films depicting reality and history as filtered through the aesthetics of very different directors: Robert Frank, D. A. Pennebaker, John Schlesinger, Ivars Kraulîtis, Joyce Chopra, Richard Leacock, Joris Ivens, Agnès Varda, Michel Brault, Gilles Groulx, Cecilia Mangini and Sandro Franchina.

You can find the complete program of the entire festival here.

GENERAL INFORMATION: Tickets for New York Documentary Film Festival - Festival dei Popoli 2010 are available at the box office only, $9; $6 for AFA members and free for NYWIFT and PGA members.
Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10003
Subway directions: F, V to 2nd Avenue / B, D to Broadway – Lafayette / 6 to Bleecker Street.

This series has been organized and produced by: The Fitzgerald Foundation of Florence and Festival dei Popoli - International Documentary Film Festival, Florence in collaboration with: Consulate General of Italy, Italian Cultural Institute, Tuscan Region, FST- Mediateca Toscana Film Commission, Veneto Region and Anthology Film Archives.  It is presented by: New York Women in Film & Television (NYWIFT) and PGA - Producers Guild of America.  Media Partners are i-Italy.org and Film Annex

Special thanks: are given to Stefania Ippoliti, FST- Mediateca Toscana Film Commission, Tanja Meding, Terry Lawler and Paula Heredia for NYWIFT, Riccardo Viale and Simonetta Magnani (Italian Cultural Institute), John Mhiripiri and Stephanie Gray (Anthology Film Archives), Paolo Cocchi, Fabrizio Ronchi, Lucrezia Pinzani (Regione Toscana), Monica Nonis, Carlotta Martorana (Regione del Veneto), BFI, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Rosanna Coscia (Jolly Hotel Madison Towers).

All photos are from Enrica Colusso's ABC Colombia.