Around the world on a tightrope

The attention to the lives of people who tread a fine and fragile line that spans the tumult and mayhem of the world below. The stubborn tenacity of daily existence, while everything implodes around us. The courage to not give up on our dreams of the life we would like to lead. The lightness advocated by Italo Calvino as a response to a world on fire.

These are the main themes underlying the lineup of the 21st edition of Giornate degli Autori and vividly reimagined in our poster this year, through a powerfully evocative image.

The lead characters in our films, both men and women, are often creatures poised over an abyss, walking a tightrope: at times, to reach the other side, or else to escape from something behind them, or just because, seen from above – lost in time, lost in space – things look very different.

The female leads of the only Italian title in competition, Taxi Monamour, the fourth feature film by Ciro De Caro, walk that tightrope in the freethinking, rigorous tale of two women who have lost their way (Rosa Palasciano and Yeva Sai), yet stubbornly persist in seeking to live their lives the way they freely choose to.

And the acrobatic feats turn only real, and not just metaphorical, for the characters in Alpha., the third feature film by Dutch filmmaker Jan-Willem Van Ewijk. His suspenseful psychoanalytical thriller revolves around a troubled father-and-son relationship and is set high in the Swiss Alps.

Two teenagers fall in love for everyone to see, while a woman is leaving her husband. Nothing out of the ordinary here – except that we’re in Iran. Boomerang is a sophisticated debut for Shahab Fotouhi, with the Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze stepping in to do the editing. It’s a contemporary sociological take on relationships in Tehran today.

Another character who turns her back on her placid life and her very identity is the lead in Selon Joy by Camille Lugan, one-time AD to Jacques Audiard. A clash between good and evil, and between innocence and crime, thrusts Joy into a new life and a new self. The cast features Asia Argento and Raphaël Thiéry, standing in for the devil and the celestial, respectively.

Saina is a funambulist with a double and quite acrobatic life: a herdsman by day and a performer on horseback by night, poised between his rural life and the capitalist world beyond in To Kill a Mongolian Horse, a spectacular, pictorial debut by Mongolian filmmaker Jiang Xiaoxuan, with Jia Zhangke perhaps her cinematic muse.

We leave the wintry steppes of Mongolia for the Amazon, specifically the swamps of Marajó, the world’s largest island situated in a river, in Manas. Brazilian filmmaker Marianna Brennand brings to the screen the story of a thirteen-year-old girl who rebels against a history of domestic violence and trauma handed down from generation to generation.

The young lead in Sugar Island is also thirteen – then finds herself pregnant. To tell her story, Dominican filmmaker Johanné Gómez Terrero examines the colonial roots of the sugar industry and the lasting role of spirituality in liberation movements.

The gorgeous Georgian lovers in The Antique by Rusudan Glurjidze, a filmmaker and producer from Tbilisi, dance on their own fine line between intimacy and rupture. Her mesmerizing, many-layered film is set in St. Petersburg in 2006, a time when thousands of Georgians were illegally deported to Russia.

And just like the herons gliding through the air in our poster, the two films rounding out the competition lineup cut across time. Super Happy Forever, the third feature film from Kohei Igarashi, recounts a love story we never see while it is underway, only when it is all over (that comes first) and then when it hasn’t even started yet. Meanwhile, time is fractured like the colors in a kaleidoscope in Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hour Glass, the latest, eagerly-awaited effort by the brilliant Quay Brothers, a quirky blend of stop-motion animation and live action inspired by the story collection of the same name by Polish writer Bruno Schulz. The search for his late father becomes a metaphysical journey that disassembles time and reality.

In this year’s special event films, the tightrope that is our lives is walked by men and women who fight for the present, or seek out some paradise; who come to terms with their pasts, or take the road less traveled by, or even, with greater difficulty but no less passion, declare and defend their own gender identity.

Our film screening out of competition on our opening day is The Open Couple, directed by Federica Di Giacomo, starring Chiara Francini, who is also the producer, and based on the play by the same name by Franca Rame and Dario Fo, which Francini has staged for years now. A freewheeling documentary in form and content, the film wields irony and intelligence to ponder couples today, monogamy vs. polyamory, and how and why the received ideas about lifestyle models should be challenged.

The Colombian film Soul of the Desert by Monica Taboada Tapia is a documentary on the road that tracks the journey by Georgina, an elderly transgender woman forced to cross the sandy peninsula Guajira, on foot, to obtain the thing she has desired for almost half a century: a document that will hand her the right to be what she has always felt she was, and will allow her, at long last, to vote.  

The French filmmaker Marie Losier, well known for her intimate portraits of underground artists, revisits the iconic feminist singer and performer Peaches and a seventeen-year-long friendship (Peaches Goes Bananas). The result is an anti-biographical portrait of the artist that still captures her essence, and the trust and friendship between the two women.

The search for a new Eden, and the happiness along with the existential and ethical angst that follow, are at the heart of the new film by Serbian documentarian Mladen Kovačević, Possibility of Paradise: a bold vision, subtly rendered, of what it means to live in an earthly paradise that doesn’t belong to us, culturally (Bali, here).

In Soudan, souviens-toi the Franco-Tunisian woman filmmaker Hind Meddeb meticulously reconstructs the fragments of the ongoing war in Sudan and the voices of resilience: the young people who struggle against their oppressors, in a country devastated by poverty and civil war.

The Portuguese filmmaker Cláudia Varejão, the 2022 Giornate winner, has given our showcase a surprise gift, and all the more special for it: the short film Kora. It’s a manifesto against war and discrimination against women, over which audiences in the darkened theater will find common ground.

The closing film, screening out of competition, is Italy’s Basileia by Isabella Torre, the story of treasure hunters and the places to stash their troves, with the help of ethereal nymphs poised to chase off the defilers of the treasure. An atmospheric, unconventional film, scored by Andrea De Sica and edited by Jonas Carpignano, Basileia represents the end of a cycle of places, stories, and personal and collective journeys, as well as film genres and styles, aesthetics and narrative choices.