(Overview of 3rd Cinecittà Italian Doc Season)
Bertha Dochouse is hosting the Cinecittà: Italian Doc Season on 20-21 July. This is the third such showcase of Italian actualities and each London screening will be followed by a Q&A session.
FRAGMENTS OF A LIFE LOVED.
Born in France, but based in Rome, Chloé Barreau draws on the visual archive she has been compiling since she was 16 to complement the recollections of some old flames in Fragments of a Life Loved. Exploring what is lost and what remains when love ends, this is as much a treatise on memory as it is on how people are shaped by their relationships. But what intrigues most is the fact that Barreau leaves the interviews with 12 former lovers to an off-camera amanuensis so that they can talk freely about their experiences with a woman who has often `loved not wisely but too well'.
First love Sébastien Ryckelynck is a little coy about the 1990s schooldays liaison that took differing turns either side of a brief separation. But college friend Jeanne Rosa is adamant that nothing ever happened between them, even though Chloé had a crush. Laurent Charles-Nicolas is also insistent that things remained low key after meeting Chloé at a party, although he kept seeing her while she was embarking upon her first same-sex relationship, with Ariane Deboise, after they had hooked up at another Sorbonne soirée.
Film-maker Rebecca Zlotowski got to know Chloé because she was one of her older sister's friends. She is grateful for the fact that Chloé saw something in her that she had not detected in herself and, during their two-year romance, gave her the confidence to find herself. However, they parted after Rebecca discovered that Chloé had seduced her friend, Anne Berest. She recalls that loving Chloé had made her feel tipsy with excitement. But she remains discomfited by Chloé's lie about never having slept with another woman and confides that they have not spoken in 25 years.
As we see images that reveal how fixated Chloé was with each partner, several speakers claim that she was always more in love with love than she was with them. They recall that she was extremely intense when she had feelings for someone. But, as she so often viewed the world through the lens of her camcorder, her eye eventually wandered and Rebecca accuses her of hurting a lot of people by being self-centred, tactless, and a brazen liar.
Gay Québecois Jean-Philippe Raiche remembers meeting Chloé in a bar and consoling each other after painful break-ups. But he admits to having felt a bit used when she abandoned him to have a one-night stand with Anna Mouglalis after she had followed her home. Soon afterwards, Chloé left for Italy and Anna reads from a parting letter that she had sent her (although the film doesn't reveal that they later collaborated on the short film, Anna M.).
Bianca Di Cesare got to know Chloé in Rome and admits to having enjoyed how fixated the Frenchwoman seemed with her. However, this also made her feel vulnerable, as she reckons it's easier to keep up one's defences with a man than it is with a woman. Erasmus scholar Marina Jankovic succumbed on the night she met Chloé in the bar where she was working. They had each denied being a lesbian before sleeping together and Marina remembers how besotted she became during the four years in which they were together (and which saw them make a 2004 documentary on Chelsea supporters, Blue Is the Colour, while Marina was studying in London).
The long-distance nature of the relationship, however, allowed Chloé to indulge in flings with Bianca and Marco Giuliani, who saw no harm in being friends with benefits until he felt things were becoming too intense on Chloé's part and he cheerfully waved her off back to Paris. Here, she met Carolina Vieira-Lima, who was in her thirties and felt that the relationship would last. When Chloé's ardour cooled, however, Carolina had an affair with a woman she calls Marie. On learning the truth, Chloé had asked to meet Marie in the hope of getting closure. But it only dawned on Carolina years later that the pair had become an item.
Most interviewees seem content to confide and all seem pleased that Chloé has so many keepsakes from their relationships, with Jean-Philippe opining that it's nice having a chronicler to prove that we existed. Some discuss the sensations they experienced, but Rebecca isn't prepared to discuss her sex life on screen. We also see little of Chloé, as she prefers turning the camera on others. Thus, she remains somewhat elusive, even though she has just aired her private life in a confessional actuality that doesn't always present her in the most flattering light.
One suspects there are others who turned down the chance to wander down this particular offshoot of Memory Lane and it would be interesting to know how many would have participated if Chloé herself had been posing the questions. It would also be nice to know what lay behind the younger Barreau's compulsive need to photograph her partners. But she remains mercurially peripheral in this record of her amours, which leaves her with a lot of explaining to do. Dare we hope for a right of reply?
THE SECRET DRAWER.
A life well lived is celebrated in Costanza Quatriglio's The Secret Drawer, as she sifts through the contents of the twin studies left by her nonagenarian journalist, critic, and novelist father, Giuseppe. Amassed over seven decades, most of which he spent writing for the Giornale di Sicilia, Giuseppe's archive provides both a unique perspective on the period following the Second World War and a deeply personal and poignant record of a proud father's relationship with his daughter.
Having agreed to donate her father's papers to the Biblioteca Centrale della Regione Siciliana, Costanza decides to film the librarians, archivists, and indexers who come to the house in Palermo in order to catalogue not only Giuseppe's books and documents, but also the 60,000 photo negatives, dozens of 8mm film reels, and hundreds of hours of audio recordings that he had squirrelled away for posterity. She divides the process into several volumes, with the first few being devoted to Giuseppe's remarkable life that saw him take up assignments in Paris, Berlin, North America, Japan, and North Africa, as well as Sicily and mainland Italy. Among the notables he encountered were Carlo Levi, Jean-Paul Sartre, Leonardo Sciascia, poet Ignazio Buttitta, painter Renato Guttuso, and Nobel Prize laureate, Enrico Fermi, while he made the acquaintance of such film stars as Anna Magnani, Cary Grant, and Ingrid Bergman during visits to the sets of such landmark pictures as Luchino Visconti's La terra trema (1948), William Dieterle's Volcano, and Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli (both 1950).
Dubbed `an Argonaut with a golden fleece for luggage', Giuseppe (who died in 2017) capped his career with the lauded 2000 tome, A Thousand Years in Sicily. But he also foresaw the significance of such pressing issues as depopulation, migration, pollution, climate change, the rise of the Arab world, and tensions between Russia and Ukraine, while also reporting with precision and compassion on such momentous events as the 1968 earthquake in Belice.
There's only room for so much reflection, however, even though Costanza had filmed her father discussing his life in 2010-11. Clips from these touching exchanges are interspersed throughout this intimate and intriguing reflection on filial devotion, cultural value, legacy, and personal and collective memory with archival material and footage of the library transfer, which reveal the responsibility that Costanza feels for the weight of history lining her father's shelves.
But her own history is contained in Giuseppe's treasure trove, as he recorded her progress from birth to pigtails in home movies and commissioned portrait painters to immortalise her in oils. She had originally intended this profile to be a short, but it expanded to feature length during the pandemic and it could easily sprawl to TV series length. But editor Letizia Caudullo (who died just before the Berlin Film Festival premiere) makes a wonderful job of mosaicking the images of a lifetime with a finesse that recalls the replica of the portrait of King Roger II from the Church of Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio that Giuseppe had presented to the United States as a gift from a grateful island.
FOOD FOR PROFIT.
Journalist Giulia Innocenzi teams up with documentarist Pablo D'Ambrosi in Food For Profit to expose the €387 billion link between Europe's main legislative institutions and the transcontinental meat industry. Containing distressing farm footage obtained by undercover activists, this continues the hard-hitting approach started by Victor Schonfeld and Myriam Alaux's The Animals Film (1981). However, the pair also enlist the help of a lobbyist, who uses a hidden camera to record meetings with leading politicians within a European Union that claims to be committed to ethical and ecologically viable agriculture.
Following hideous images obtained by Stef of `waste' chickens being treated with barbaric cruelty at an intensive poultry farm in the Po delta, Innocenzi doorsteps the manager (without revealing his face or naming his company). She also visits the group's headquarters to question the head of PR, but gets fobbed off with a pat answer.
The next destination is Brussels, where a lobbyist Lorenzo Mineo smuggles a camera into a seminar being addressed by pro-meat campaigner, Frank Mitloehner. He presents the animal scientist who infamously claimed that transportation does more damage to the environment than livestock with a fake proposal about six-legged pigs. He doesn't dismiss the idea and gives him some contact advice, although Andrea Bertaglio, the author of In Defence of Meat, is more cautious. Lorenzo next sets his sights on MEP Paolo De Castro, who is a member of the Agriculture Committee that is about to redraft the Common Agricultural Policy with its €387 billion spend (which is 31% of the EU budget). He puts Mineo in touch with Clara Aguilera, who insists that all decisions are taken legally and in the best interests of the greater good.
Back in the field, Guido infiltrates a dairy farm outside Berlin, where conditions are filthy, cows are beaten, and there is a problem with mastitis (which results in the extensive use of antibiotics). He films an non-vet injecting animals with drugs, but she claims that chocolate is just as dangerous to humans when Innocenzi confronts her. The plant manager is more aggressive in insisting that bad things also happen in football and that smoking and drinking are more of a threat.
Having scored her points with her show of outrage, Innocenzi moves on to avian flu and the prospect that giant intensive farms around Żuromin in Poland could contribute to the next pandemic. Mayor Aneta Goliat is dismayed by the effects of proliferation, so Innocenzi attempts to quiz lobbyist Dariusz Goszczyński in Warsaw. But, having heard the question, he refuses to speak with her because she doesn't have a business card.
She drops the frightening topic of gene editing into the conversation en route to Brussels, where Mineo seeks to meet Pekka Pesonen, the head of Copa-Cogeca, the most influential meat lobby in Europe. He approves of the featherless chickens produced in Israel to save time in plucking and curses that the Chinese can tinker with less scrutiny than elsewhere. Pesonen is endorsing De Castro in the 2019 EU elections because he supports gene editing and backs an increase in meat consumption, even though the United Nations recommends a decrease.
Farmer Benoît Crossart is also running for office after breeding extra-muscular bulls, in spite of the health risks they face. He says it is possible to get things done, but it's not always easy. Mineo meets a commissioner who suggests Africa, as a potential site for an egg-laying experiment (which prompts Innocenzi to mention colonial exploitation). He also sounds out MEPs Gilles Lebreton, Isabella Tovaglieri, and Attila Ara-Kovács about a bogus process to convert cattle excrement into feed using a rectal tube. Pushing his luck, he mentions the six-legged pig and a cow with two reproductive systems to increase milk yields, but he still gets a hearing, even from De Castro.
With Mineo deciding he's gone far enough, he withdraws from the picture. So, Innocenzi turns to the impact of factory farming on climate change. Spanish farmer Pepe helps her expose the effect that pork farming is having on water quality and supply in Murcia. She also acquires footage of the appalling conditions within the farms and drives up for another stonewalled showdown. A phone call with the disinterested corporate president sends Innocenzi in the direction of the feed crops grown with subsidies given by the EU to ensure compliance with eco policies.
The focus shifts again to worker exploitation, as Innocenzi is prevented from interviewing Romanians working in a German abattoir that had been caught cramming sub-contracted workers into cramped living conditions during Covid. Stef infiltrates a farm near Rome that largely employs migrant labour and Innocenzi's crew were tailed for 45 minutes after trying to film there at night.
Claiming to be sick of the chicanery that is bolstering a green deal that is anything but and yet being paid for with public money, Innocenzi announces that she is going after the big players in this dangerous game. She gets Pesonen to admit that productivity is the key aim of EU farming strategies. Then, she targets the MEPs who listened to Lorenzo's outrageous schemes. Among them is Clara Aguilera, who recklessly declares, `I am not interested in the happiness of the chicken, the rabbit, or the cat. I eat them anyway.'
She waylays De Castro after the CAP vote and succeeds in irritating him with a comment about monies he receives. But he carries on regardless and has since strengthened his position. Innocenzi ends with a personal appeal to camera to end subsidies to intensive farms and recaps the reasons why they are bad for consumers, workers, animals, and the planet. It's heartfelt and combative stuff. Yet one can't help think she might have gone about things without some of the ego-tripping grandstanding that invariably emerges with this style of Pilgeresquely confrontational documentary-making.
This isn't to say that Innocenzi and D'Ambrosi aren't spot on in what they say. The same goes for their talking heads: philosopher Peter Singer on humanity's arrogance towards animalkind; Nina Holland from the Corporate Europe Observatory on the purpose and practices of lobbying; author David Quammen on the overuse of antibiotics in farming and the threat of viral chatter; novelist Jonathan Safran Foer on factory farming and climate change; and writer Timothy Raeymaekers on worker exploitation. It's just a shame they didn't make more of them and devoted less time to Innocenzi's farm gate stunts.
A lot less of Alessandro Giovanetto's score might also have tempered the tone, as its pulsating is almost parodically pugnacious and foreboding. By contrast, Jonathan Reyes's graphics and animations are admirably well judged in their efforts to illustrate complex points and snag the attention of younger viewers. D'Ambrosi's editing of the covert footage gives proceedings a guerrilla feel, while there's much satisfaction to be derived from watching the great and the good in Brussels fall prey to foot in mouth disease. But, for all its good intentions, this five-year enterprise too often feels like a vanity project that fails to exploit the situations it creates.
Comments