Felice D'Agostino, Gaetano Crivaro & Margherita Pisano
Italy | 2021 | 51 min
World premiere
Language : Italian
Subtitles : English, French
South Sardinia, a land of ancestral and rough beauty the rural traditions of which have not been erased by modernity. Every year, the people of the region gather to worship the icon, martyr and warrior Saint’Efisio. Rondò Final invites us to participate in this ritual which remains intact in its antique beauty while everything around it changes.
In South Sardinia, Saint Esifio has been worshipped since 1656, year in which he liberated both towns from the Plague. Every year his statue travels 80km in a grandiose procession that seems to be immune to the passage of time: the same ceremony is repeated in strict observation of the original ritual. Made up of over a century of archive material, Rondò Final is a mesmerizing journey in which faces and landscapes past and present are reflected, assembled by the editing in a spiral of repetition that allows only superficial changes. The beauty of the props and the mysticism that shrouds every gesture evokes mechanisms of control and power that have subjugated Sardinia for centuries. The archival fragments and the meticulous sound design reveal a violent contrast between the poverty of the population and the opulence of the Church which, alongside the State, still controls Sardinia and Italy till today.
Rebecca De Pas
