Movie Screening
Cineforum
The screening will be followed by a discussion with the Director, Susanna Nicchiarelli.
SYNOPSIS:
Rome, 1981: with seven shots from a revolver, two members of the Red Brigade gun down professor Mario Tessandori in the university courtyard, in plain sight. He dies in the arms of his friend and colleague Lucio Astengo. A few weeks later, Lucio Astengo himself disappears.
It is now 2011. Caterina and Barbara Astengo, who were six and twelve years old when their father died, have put their family’s beach home – now abandoned for some time – up for sale. The house is full of memories of a childhood interrupted by their father’s disappearance, of a family broken and never put back together. In one corner, a 1970srotary dial telephone is still plugged in to the wall, though has been disconnected for years. Caterina feeling nostalgic at the sight of the old phone, lifts the receiver and inexplicably hears a dial tone. She tries dialing a few numbers, but the phone remains silent. Then, almost as a game, she tries the number of their home in the city thirty years earlier. This time, she hears ringing: a child’s voice answers. It is herself, twelve years old, one week before her father’s disappearance. Fate has given her a second chance: if not to save her father, then at least to discover the truth.
Italy- 2012, color, 95 min.
Directed by Susanna Nicchiarelli
Film in Italian with English subtitles
TRAILER (via Youtube)
Cineforum movie series is presented in collaboration with Italians in DC
DOORS OPEN AT 6:30PM AND CLOSE PROMPTLY AT 7:00PM
RSVP
Please click on “Make a Reservation” by June 12, 2013 at 2 PM
The Reservation System will allow you to register until we reach
capacity or by the event’s date and time above (whichever comes
first.)
PLEASE NOTE: RESERVATION IS REQUIRED FOR OUR EVENTS FOR SECURITY REASONS. A RESERVATION IS NOT A GUARANTEE OF A SEAT. OUR VENUE HAS LIMITED SEATING AND WE WILL ACCOMODATE GUESTS ON A FIRST-COME FIRST-SERVED BASIS. GUESTS WITHOUT SEATS ARE WELCOME TO STAND IF THEY LIKE.
PHOTO ID REQUIRED
LOCATION
Embassy of Italy
3000 Whitehaven Street NW
Washington, DC 20008
DIRECTOR’S NOTES:
Who wouldn’t like to go back in time, maybe to right a wrong or simply out of curiosity? Or one could go back to the past to meet an ancestor, see a dinosaur up close, save the world from war, a natural catastrophe or a terrorist attack. A hypothetical time machine could be used to positively change the course of history but if such a machine should fall in the wrong hands…….literature is full of these hypothetical or paradoxical theories. However, in my opinion, the most romantic, intense and intriguing expression of this dream is the person that wants to go back to the past to save the life of a loved one. How can you not identify with a person who chooses to rewind her or his life to cancel the pain of the premature loss of a parent?
I was struck the most by this element when reading the novel Discovery at Dawn by Walter Veltroni, where the main character utilizes a fantastic and unexplainable “magic”( a telephone that calls in the past) to recover what history had taken away and which was an inalienable right: a childhood like everyone else. I immediately saw its great cinematographic potential, a potential on which I could intervene and integrate it with images, impressions and personal memories.
My memories of Italy during that period, the past the main character of the novel tries to desperately “correct” or change, is that of a country living a fleeting moment between fear and the disgust of the violence and gloom of the late 1970s and the new wave of voluntary denial and forced light-heartedness of the early 1980s. While adults left the “Lead Years” hurt and with the will to forget and reconstruct, young people participated in the significant changes in customs, music, television and the cinema and maybe intentionally took refuge in these new fantasy worlds to escape the sadness of the adults. In fact, my main references for the making of this film were the magical and suspended tones of E.T., or the second series of The Twilight Zone, made and televised in those years, and this was not by chance. The fantastic theme of history and the setting went well with the tone and language of the type of cinema I had grown up with and loved.
From the beginning, while in the writing phase of the film, I felt the need to change the story and transform the main character from a man to a woman, Caterina. I wanted this not only to identify better with the character, but because I believed in the originality of this choice. I recognized in Margherita Buy the perfect “heroine” for this fantastic and absurd story because I believe she can use all of the tones required by the story (drama but also in some paradoxical occasions the right dose of irony). Most of the choices I made in casting followed this line of thought and above all again putting together the Margherita Buy and Sergio Rubino couple, I knew that I would have obtained intensity in the dramatic scenes and lightness and comedy where the story needed these. These changes in tone are one of the most evident characteristics, among others, of the American fantasy cinema of the 1980s which was my main reference for the film. The historical events the film refers to are invented but are relative to the actual and painful historical context of those years of terrorism. I think this film, as the novel before it, allows for an unusual consideration of the period due to the particularity of the story, the genre and the tone. This consideration is more of a private nature and maybe more feasible in virtue of its fantastic, playful and dreamlike nature which in the final phase of cathartic resolution, could furnish a variety of food for thought.
Susanna Nicchiarelli
DIRECTOR’S BIOGRAPHY:
Susanna Nicchiarelli was born in Rome in 1975. After obtaining a degree in Philosophy she continued studying at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa where she received her Masters with a thesis on Aesthetics in the Cinema. She then attended the Experimental Cinematography Center and received her diploma in film direction with the short feature Uomini e Zanzare (Men and Mosquitos). In 2009 she directed her first feature film, Cosmonaut, winning the Controcampo Italiano Prize at the 66th Venice International Film Festival and nominated as Best New Director both for the Silver Ribbon and David di Donatello awards. She also won the Frauenfilm Festival of Cologne and the Ciak D’Oro Best First Feature Film award in 2010. Her other work includes the documentaries Ca Cri Do Bo (I Diari della Sacher) {59th New Territories Venice Film Festival}, Il Terzo Occhio, L’Ultima Sentinella; the shorts Il Linguaggio dell’Amore (presented at the Rotterdam and Turin Film Festivals), Giovanno Z., Una Storia d’Amore (winner of the Audience Award at the Trevignano Film Festival and Silver Ribbon for the Best Actor to Luciano Scarpa) and Sputnik 5 (stop-motion and winner of the 2010 Silver Ribbon for Best Short Animation Director and Best Short Animation of the Brooklyn International Film Festival), some of which were produced by her own production company, Nicchia Film. Discovery at Dawn is her second feature film.
SOUNDTRACK: Original music by Gatto Ciliegia Contro Il Grande Freddo
BOOK PROFILE:
Discovery at Dawn by Walter Veltroni
(La scoperta dell’Alba, Rizzoli, Milano, 2006)
Walter Veltroni narrates the strength and torment of feelings; it is an unexpected investigation, a journey into the story of our days and a painful immersion into the bloody history of the “lead years” of terrorism in Italy; it is a passionate declaration of love and trust in the unique power of literature and imaginative invention: the power to reveal the hidden meaning of things and give us an impossible consolation.
Giovanni has an easy job, a wife to whom he really has nothing to say anymore, a little girl with Down syndrome and a 20 year old enthusiastic and generous son. His existence is flat and his life goes by slowly, frozen by the pain of a past trauma that is always present. What really happened to his father that far away morning of 1968 when Giovanni was only a child? Did the BR kidnap the calm architecture professor? And more importantly why? Giovanni remains alone in Rome during an intolerably silent August and follows an irresistible impulse; he goes in search of answers where everything started: his parent’s country house. Here he makes an impossible and disconcerting discovery.
This is a novel of collective memory, a thriller, a political story with a fantasy touch: Walter Veltroni’s first novel earned him the enthusiastic applause of the public and critics.
Walter Veltroni has held important political positions in Italy. He was the Deputy Prime Minister during the Romano Prodi government and national secretary of the PD party. He has published other books for BUR and Rizzoli: Perhaps God is Sick; Without Patricio, The disk of the world, The New Season, We, the Beginning of Obscurity and the Island and the Roses.
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