Nadine Al Lahham, Instable, 2015, video, 2’28”
The movie reflects on the personal feelings of Nadine Al Lahham as a migrant looking for a place to stay while going through the stage of uncertainty and instability. She made this film when she had to stay in Turkey, after the ban on Syrians’ entry to Lebanon was imposed. In order to emphasize those feelings, she worked with people with no prior experience in filming.
Francesca Banchelli, Antitesi Popolare, 2008, video, 9’43”
Antitesi Popolare is the action of a small group of people looking for a contact with a flock of cormorants through a journey inside their habitat along the river Arno in Italy. The group does not have a scientific plan that could give them a tangible solution on which behavior they should assume; their manners are pure and followed by an emotional childish curiosity. Their behaviors are essential and are completed by the gesture of feeding the birds with fish. The action starts in the early morning and finishes in the afternoon, without a real contact with the birds having occurred. By challenging a group of young people to undertake an unforeseeable experience, the aim was to activate a sense of essential communication between them, by transforming the journey in a new born collectivity, formed at the end of the shootings.
Bassil Halabi and Mohammad Fares, Beyond the Station, 2015, video, 5’28”
The two authors selected a suitcase as a symbol for migration: There is someone who is putting himself in a suitcase as they did when they left Syria and came to Turkey. It is not the country they came to by their decision or their selection. They are carrying all their history with them.
Babak Inaloo, Les Photos Retrouvées, 2014, video, 9’08”, © Babak Inaloo
Les Photos Retrouvées is an experimental short documentary, made by Babak Inaloo in Calais in the year 2019. He used photos that he took and collected since 2015 and asked habitants and migrants in Calais to take a look at the photographs and talked with them about their thoughts and reflections. It is a work about photography and memories and was initially made to be shown at the exhibition Calais – Witness to the jungle at Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Babak Inaloo & Ali Hagooi, The Bridge, 2016, SD video, 9’38”
The Bridge is a short documentary by Ali Haghgooi and Babak Inaloo, made during their stay in a refugee camp in Calais. For both it was the first experience in France and they created this work with very basic materials that were available to them at that time. The short film shows the story of two Iranian migrants and their daily life in the camp.
Batool Mohamad, I Love Death, 2014, 4’16”
The revolutionary movement of Syria has not only been asking for a political change when it took the streets in 2011, but also to reaffirm the existence of individuality in society. Our personal individuality was brutally oppressed by the dictatorial one-party ruling and the purely state-controlled organizations and trade unions, striving to ideologically uniform the people from the youngest age in the Baath Pioneer Organization.
Hyacynthe Ndongo, The Prayer, 2010, 3’48”
Invited to a business dinner, Kamdem does not know how to use the Western cutlery. He feels lost and embarrassed in this unusual setting, when one of his colleagues who is also his cousin asks to bless the meal in mother tongue and so, getting the opportunity to explain Kamdem how to use the cutlery and to spare him from humiliation.
Caterina Pecchioli, Mani Nostre /Talking Hands, 2016, 64”, Italian with English subtitles
Following Pasolini, who in Comizi d’Amore as an improvised travelling salesman studied the sexual preferences of Italians with the sincere intention of understanding and faithfully reporting them, I took a similar position to investigate another subject: the relationship of Italians with legality, justice and a sense of ethics. In the intimacy of a living room, like a wagon creates, I tried to stimulate personal narratives and avoid general comments in order to get to know the motives of the actions and thoughts of my interlocutors. (CP)
Talking Hands is a story suspended between reality and poetry. A train ride through Italy from north to south to investigate the relationship of its inhabitants with legality and corruption. What results is a composite picture, where are the hands of the respondents to tell the stories, along a track that alternates the reality of the documentary with the abstraction of video art. (Beatrice Rinaldi, indie-eye)
director: Caterina Pecchioli
photography: Aimée Zito Lema, Caterina Pecchioli
editing: Aline Amélie Bonvin, Caterina Pecchioli
original music: Juan Felipe Waller
sound
design & mix: Giacomo Vitullo
produced by Dugong in co-production with Shoot&Post
producers: Giulia Achilli, Marco Alessi, Caterina Pecchioli
associate producer: Luca Borkowsky
IT, DE, SE, 2016
Caterina Pecchioli, Neverland, 2013, two channel video, 4’34”
The video shows an action of back and forth in a loop. In the action the artist is climbing the cost oft he island of Panterlleria, Sicily, where hundreds of migrants have been and still are disembarking every year. The landscape appears as moonland, as Garzia Marquez has described it. The black volcanic rocks, sharp and unstable, are a challenging walk, the same way it is challenging to leave known territory and to embark on a voyage towards something unknown, in a constant search for a place and for oneself.
Caterina Pecchioli, Chalk line, 2008, 4′
Just with a chalk line Caterina isolated an ants community inside its own territory. The fact that most of the ants do not cross the line brings to a division of the community that effects the all organization, bringing to ineffective and self-destructive behaviors. Nature mechanisms are used in the video to reflect on nations territories separations and use of control and fear.
Duccio Ricciardelli, Porto Sonoro, 2015, video, 5’36”
This documentary wants to be a tribute to two works that have always fascinated the author: Berlin – Die Sinfonie Großstadt by Walter Ruttmann and A propos de Nice by Jean Vigo. It is a film about listening to an environment strongly conditioned by huge machines and containers but also full of moments of sound tranquillity. Visual-auditory suggestions of the port of Genoa, paintings of a life taken from life that can suggest the beginnings of stories, suspensions of meaning and human paths.
concept and direction: Duccio Ricciardelli
video editing: Marco Bartolini
sound: Toku Katayama
Moawia Shannan, To a Friend, 2015, video, 1’06”
To a Friend is a video taken in one single shot. The actor of the movie is Moawia himself as well as the narrator of the Arabic poem. When Moawia was walking along this alley in Istanbul he was remembering his home in Damascus. The movie is about his memory and the missing friend.
Vittoria Soddu, Back Hill – tales from a parish house, 2014, video, 36′
London 1984, the first victim of the AIDS epidemic was a young Italian convict, one of Father Carmelo’s ragazzi – a group of youngsters who sought rescue within the immigrant community of the Italian church of St Peter’s on Back Hill. Through a long forgotten archive of photographs, the histories and presence of the ragazzi within the domestic space of the parish house is reactivated in a fragmented narrative, which mirrors the structure of the building itself – embodying the tales of Carmelo, protagonist and sole beholder of this memory.