L'Archivio a Oriente
Firouzeh Khosrovani, Goutam Ghose, Makoto Shinozaki & Wang Xiaoshuai
Italy | 2012 | 53 min
World premiere
Languages : Italian, Persian, Chinese
Subtitle : English
The Istituto Luce in Rome is one of the world’s best-known film archives. Its newsreels, spanning the period from the 1920s to the 1970s, are an inexhaustible source of information about a crucial period of 20th century history. They are therefore analysed by historians, who regard films as important documents for the study of society. On the other hand, isolated from the Italian narrative context, they are open to reinterpretation. This is the case of this film produced by the Istituto Luce, which asked four contemporary Asian directors to remix images shot by Italian operators in Asia during the last century, to reflect their own culture and sensibility. Thus Goutam Ghose (India) uses freely-arranged shots to create a sort of musical score; Firouzeh Khosrovani (Iran) reviews his life and the history of his country; Makoto Shinozaki (Japan) reflects on the nature of images themselves; Wang Xiaoshuai (China) pays tribute to his centenarian grandmother.
Luciano Barisone
Translation BMP Translations