Mr. Rotpeter

Synopsis
In 1917, a short novel by Franz Kafka appeared on a magazine. It is called A Report to an Academy, the story of Mr Rotpeter, a monkey who transformed into a man. During his academical report, Mr Rotpeter talks about his metamorphosys. Mr Rotpeter’s imaginary portrait by Antonietta De Lillo runs two levels: the fragments of the kafkian lesson, as his past, and the interview, as his present. Antonietta De Lillo creates a cinematographic character that brings in universal topics such as freedom and survival, drawing a contemporary portrait of our society. Through her peculiar narration, Antonietta De Lillo imagines a “neapoletan” Mr Rotpeter: he walks through the streets of Naples, in Molosiglio’s gardens, he climbs the stairs of the prestigious University of Naples Federico II, he observes families playing on the grass on a sunday morning in Capodimonte’s wood. At the end he gives to an imaginary journalist a long interview. Though Mr Rotpeter is a fantastic character, between a beast and a man, the power of cinema is to create the illusion of reality. Mr Rotpeter could be an ordinary person one could meet on the street by chance. Mr Rotpeter’s reflections on our times put the spectators in front of a mirror and allow them to reflect themselves with him and his metamorphosys.

Director’s statement
Everyhting started when Marcello Garofalo invited me to watch a theatre performance of the kafkian A Report to an Academy, created and played by Marina Confalone, one of the greatest italian actresses. So I went to see her show in the famous Federico II University of Naples. I started to imagine a contemporary Rotpeter, set in a nowaday Naples, and I wanted to let him free from the written paper and make him alive through a long interview. With all the peculiarities of a fiction film I made my first portrait to an imaginary character born from a writer’s pen. What fascinated me about Mr Rotpeter was his desperate search for a way out. That was my starting point. Together with Marcello Garofalo I started to imagine an integrated Rotpeter, whose achievemet of a way out led him to a survival, not to freedom. Rotpeter is a creature between a beast and a man, he talks about our human condition through his personal experience. Rotpeter is forced to observe and imitate a world that imprison him, in order to adapt and survive. As well as him, we human beings are often forced to adapt to a society that is more and more subdued to economical powers, causing our loss of freedom and humanity. The “neapoletan” Mr Rotpeter fights his own personal cause for survival but, at the end of a long imaginary conversation, he has the need to fight for others too. I believe that we should listen to Mr Rotpeter’s desire, if we want to emancipate ourself from a condition that degenerates our nature. Antonietta De Lillo

UN CITTADINO – VIDEORITRATTO AD ALDO BOZZI

Non dubitare mai che un piccolo gruppo di cittadini coscienziosi ed impegnati possa cambiare il mondo. In verità è l’unica cosa che è sempre accaduta. Margaret Mead

UN CITTADINO non è un romanzo, non è un documentario, è una piccola pagina di quello che ciascuno di noi, se crede alle proprie convinzioni, può fare. Così come l’avvocato Aldo Bozzi, da solo con i suoi 26 amici avvocati, è riuscito a far dichiarare incostituzionale una legge elettorale che sentiva ledere alcuni dei nostri diritti fondamentali.
Speriamo che questo lavoro sia il primo di una serie di mini ritratti d’autore, in bilico tra cinema e giornalismo, per dar voce ai sentimenti che hanno mosso azioni in campo sociale, politico, culturale, che meritano di essere raccontate.

(In)Felix

Un viaggio in un immaginario futuro che stiamo contaminando

Note di Regia
Quando, tempo fa, ho letto un articolo del geologo Giovanni Balestri che profetizzava, fatti alla mano, la fine della vita nella mia terra nel 2064, ho sentito l’esigenza di raccontare questo fenomeno mediante la settima arte. Certamente un lavoro cinematografico non può avere la pretesa di proporsi come panacea della drammaticità sociale che il fenomeno sta generando ma, come sempre, il cinema può dare un prezioso contributo alla campagna di sensibilizzazione che si sta mettendo in atto. Maria Di Razza

 

Today Together, Tomorrow Too

Today Together, Tomorrow Too is a compositionof faces, places and stories collected by different directors throughout Italy. OIDA – participated film conceived and curated by Antonietta De Lillo – composes a portrait of love at our times through fragments of different materials – documentaries, investigations, animations and found footage.
The casualness and the normalcy of the stories that we can see in this documentary are the key to express the most elusive of all feelings – love. The result is a complex image, that represents the density of our relationships in this moment of crisis and social transformations in which we live.
Forty years have gone by since the Italian referendum on divorce and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Love Meetings. Today Together, Tomorrow Too  investigates the feeling of love portraying the changes in our country – the breakdown of marriage and traditional family values, the human and economic crisis, the lack of work, the change of sexual behaviour, the bio-technologic revolution, the growth of immigration and the difficulty in confronting cultures that are different from our own.
We chose to startfrom the darkest aspects of love -abandonment, intolerance, violence and hate. Through the street interviews and the stories collected by the directors that participated in the project, we will meet couples who have been together all their lives and people who have never met love, along withthe those who have to cope with the harsh feelings that usually follow a breakup. Traditional families, enlarged families, exploded families, recomposed families, new balances made of people who are willing to stay together even after their stories are over. Different forms of love, sometimes more fragile, sometimes more powerful and free go togetherwith the vision of the youngest people interviewed, who search for an absolute pure and true love that might be free of social judgement and of conditioning based on age, culture and gender.
The participated film by marechiarofilm shows love in its widest form, meaning not only a relationship between two people, but also the love of parents for their children, love towards strangers and love as an opportunity to elevate ourselves beyond ourselves, our selfishness and our fears. It is a confirmation that in our selfish society more and more concentrated on cynic and individualistic models, love is still the most powerful energy moving things and is often the best antidote to our solitude.

Let’s Go

 

 

The story of Luca is that of a 46 year-old photographer who has been forced to retire from life and love; it is also the story of many other people overwhelmed by isolation and the economic emergency. But Luca is also an artist who has begun writing a letter addressed both to an ideal love as well as to us all. He guides us in a cosmopolitan journey through experiences that are often more arduous than his and recounts the story of a person who is determined to carry on without anger while struggling not to be overcome by the events.

FORBICI

La violenza sulla donna, che trova il suo apice nel femminicidio, non ha una matrice dominante. Non c’è un censo, una cultura, una prossimità, o un’esperienza di violenze che inneschi un rapporto causa/effetto ben identificabile. Il fenomeno è trasversale, colpisce nei luoghi più imprevisti e dilaga, emergendo dalle paludi della reticenza, solo in proporzione al grado di emancipazione raggiunto dalle donne. L’episodio è ispirato a un fatto di cronaca accaduto in provincia di Napoli nel luglio 2012.

FILI INVISIBILI

Elena con la piccola Benedetta, la prima figlia nata in Italia, nel 1993 va a vivere in India dove sposa Baba Ji, col quale ha altri tre figli. Il fratello Manolo, maestro di sci, sposa dopo vent’anni una sua ex allieva belga ed hanno una figlia, Clara, che ha 6 anni e vive tra Bruxelles (insieme al fratello adottivo Alexandre, etiope, oggi sedicenne) e Alagna, piccolo comune delle Alpi. Una famiglia che abbraccia il mondo intero. Il viaggio del regista inizia dall’India dove vola ad incontrare l’amica Elena che non vede da 18 anni, e poi a Bruxelles, dove vive Clara.

Seguendo l’indicazione dello scrittore Orhan Pamuk “Le storie individuali sono di gran lunga più adatte a illustrare quanto sia profonda la nostra umanità”, il regista Andrea Papini ha realizzato un “appunto a matita” su una eccentrica famiglia di amici. Riprese realizzate con una piccola videocamera, che meritano di essere editate e mostrate a un pubblico più vasto di quello familiare. Sono scritti veloci e imprecisi, ma realizzati con la grafite, che contiene il carbonio, la materia della vita.

The crazy woman next – door

 

conversation with Alda Merini

Alda Merini tells her life in a personal and familiar narrative, fluctuating between public and private, lingering on the most significant chapters of her existence: childhood, womanhood, love, maternity and the relationship with her children, madness and the lucid reflection on poetry and art. The face of the poetess and the details of her eyes, hands, and body create a portrait that does not hide the contradictions of one of the most important and renowned literary figures of the twentieth century.

Director’s statement
Ever since i made Ogni sedia ha il suo rumore in 1995, i have always wanted to retrieve the precious unused footage from the encounter with Alda Merini. At the time, that material was entwined with Licia Maglietta’s performance, inevitably cutting out parts of the conversation with Alda Merini. This footage was recovered almost twenty years later thanks to the collaboration of Rai Cinema, becoming The crazy woman next-door, which restores that extraordinary encounter in its entirety
Antonietta De Lillo

 

the social xmas

Il Pranzo di Natale, sperimentando la commistione di linguaggi diversi, riunisce immagini amatoriali e video realizzati da professionisti; è un remix di sorgenti molteplici ed eterogenee che insieme formano un racconto unitario, grazie a un montaggio che procede seguendo una linea di associazioni che di volta in volta cambiano, privilegiando in alcuni casi legami musicali, in altri cronologici,spesso emotivi. Le immagini così si susseguono, con una tessitura aperta tra il racconto lineare di un rito collettivo e l’associazione di storie e frammenti che interagiscono o si contrappongono tra loro, mostrando immagini attuali accostate a immagini del passato, vecchi filmini di famiglia affiancati ai video dei Natali presenti.

L’attrice Piera degli Esposti, in un ruolo deliberatamente in bilico tra persona e personaggio, evidenzia i momenti peculiari del racconto e ne scandisce il tempo. I “Natali” narrati sono vari: c’è quello ingenuo e felice di un bambino che aspetta i regali da Babbo Natale, quello rassegnato e “nero “ di chi ormai ha perso tutto, quello festeggiato in solitudine e quello in comunità…I treni sono affollati di persone e desideri che raggiungono i propri cari per l’irrinunciabile pranzo di Natale. Le immagini, apparentemente frammentate, diventano lo specchio integro di una società in crisi, dal quale emerge però l’immagine di un’umanità onesta che, con orgoglio, manifesta la forza e la volontà di reagire.

The remains of nothing

It is as if De Lillo and De Medeiros were confronting and chasing after each other until they became a sole person in the throes of a marvelous utopia.
Bernardo Bertolucci

Portuguese noblewoman Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca,  the voice of the 1799 Neapolitan Revolution, together with other young Neapolitan aristocrats, battles for the ideals of equality, liberty and fraternity. All too soon, the blade of the Restoration falls on the founders of the short-lived Republic: their dream, which had briefly become reality, is shattered into thousands of pieces. The remains of nothing…”il resto è niente.”
The film chooses to recount the human and political events of Naples at the end of the 18th century by illustrating the precious hours preceding Eleonora’s death. The camera is set at the center of her soul, to record the suffering, hopes and passions of her entire life. Thus, the portrait of a courageous woman, modern and free, is created through the threads of memory.