documentary, 80’, Italy, 4k
A film by Alberto Gemmi
Producer: Gianluca De Angelis for Tekla Films (Italy)
Editing: Elisa Cantelli
DoP: Fabio Catalano
Sound: Gabriele Fasano
With the artistic participation of: Archivio Zeta
Supported by: Piemonte Doc Film Fund, Toscana Film Commision
Session pitch: Bio to B, Italian Film Festival Berlin, CPH:DOX, Visioni dal Mondo, Major Docs, Festival dei Popoli.
Other titles: Futapass, Il Tempio della Memoria
* Selection for the Proxima showcase by Doc at Work, Industry section of the Festival dei Popoli 2024
* Toscana Doc Film Fund (production) 2024
* Special mention at the Major Docs Pitch 2023
* Special mention at the Premio Solinas Documentario 2023
* Piemonte Doc Film Fund (production) 2023
* Piemonte Doc Film Fund (development) 2020
The German military cemetery of the Futa is structured like a labyrinth. Over 30,000 soldiers are buried here. Their names engraved in stone; their presence suspended in the air. The seasons pass, the landscape changes. A place for the dead, but inhabited by the living.
The Labyrinth is an investigation into places, into time, into what lingers in memory. In the woods, body seekers uncover fragments of forgotten men. The caretaker catalogs the bones, patiently, meticulously. A theater company returns year after year, performing Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain among the graves, turning history into ritual. Archival footage, voices from the past, and the writings of Cesare Pavese make memory into something fluid, preserved, continually reshaped. Nothing is final—not war, not mourning, not even death.
→ teklafilms.com
OGNI OPERA DI CONFESSIONE / All Confession Oeuvre
documentary, 67’, Italy, Full Hd, 2015
A film by Alberto Gemmi and Mirco Marmiroli
In collaboration with: Emilia-Romagna Film Commission
Curators: Marco Trulli and Claudio Zecchi
* INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE at Visions du Réel 2016 - Switzerland
You can find the documentary on DAFILMS.COM
Ogni Opera di Confessione / All Confession Oeuvre is a work focusing on the density of times, relations and memories that come out when penetrating an empty space. The void of a productive area, a big abandoned city-factory, a wreckage of the twentieth century just laying there, motionless at the end of a long journey. But people walk around the voids, swarm as the leftovers of a great story, like Japanese soldiers refusing to leave the trench despite evident defeat. Officine Meccaniche Reggiane never materialize in their whole, if not in a few frames. The entire film is actually an approaching strategy to the space, making light on a plurality of persons and individual communities living at the edges of the void. Religious communities (Pentecostal or Islamic) are the proves of the big change brought about by immigration for what concerns the transformation of districts surrounding Reggiane. A number of characters, viewpoints hinged on two silent tales that evolve during the film and are told through simple and everyday movements of the characters.
Ogni Opera di Confessione / All Confession Oeuvre is a complex object. It is a work standing on the formal certainty of film language, which is capable, at the same time, of dealing with and moving contents that, in a quasiplastic way, refer to a time, a space and gestures not belonging to the specificity of that language and embracing other languages: sculpture, installation, performance, even painting for what concerns the use of colors and portraits.
SINAI - Another step on earth
documentary, 29’, Croatia/Italy, Hd and 16mm, 2014
A film by Alberto Gemmi and Enrico Masi
With: Ivana and Sinai Zaninovic
Voice: Leila Amacker
In collaboration with: University of Bologna, University of Zadar
* INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE at Torino Film Festival 2014 - Italy
West Venice, East Constantinople.The tale of a man living at the periphery of the empire, on the croatian archipelago. A decision is to be made, on our imaginary roundabout in the middle of nowhere. The village of Velo Grablje with its five last inhabitants, disappears within fog and waves, in a region at the end of a global Europe.There is also a female voice, standing as the Delphi’s oracle. A woman born in Morocco who decided to live on this island of Hvar. If a man exists or not, this is our quest. Maybe the quest for a man to be found, or just a story representing him.
War, death, and the heritage of socialism, through the relationship between Ivana, one generation ahead, and his uncle, born Sinai Zaninovic.
→ caucaso.info