Perla Sardella
Italy | 2020 | 21 min
World premiere
Language : no dialogue
Subtitles : English, French
Mario Lorenzini is a mystery of cinema. Dying suddenly, he left behind him an unprecedented and secret cinematographic body of work, filmed in Super 8. Images chronicling the daily life of an Italian village, saved from oblivion thanks to the work of Perla Sardella, who turns them into a posthumous love letter.
Mario Lorenzini is a real enigma of cinema. He was a farmer, a hunter, and a film buff. He lived in Rimasco, a small community in the Piedmont mountains. At the end of the 1960s, Lorenzini bought a Super 8 camera and became an amateur filmmaker. A man of passion, a great pleasure-seeker, he then dedicated himself to filmmaking. He filmed the day to day of mountain-dwelling life, his neighbours, the slaughter of pigs, the passing of the seasons, and the scenery of a territory that subtly changes with every take... He thus constructed a moving account of life in the mountains, isolated, an outlying territory not represented—or very little at the time—in institutional film. We can look at Lorenzini’s archives like those of a great unfinished film, which Perla Sardella saves from oblivion here. This is not about reconstituting a story, but questioning the recovered memory of a territory found, or unravelling the mystery of an unknown gaze. What if film was ultimately just that, an impossible conversation with ghosts?
Elena López Riera
