Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries

Bestiari, Erbari, Lapidari

Massimo D'Anolfi & Martina Parenti
Italy, Switzerland | 2024 | 205 min
Swiss Premiere
Languages : Italian, German, English
Subtitles : English, French

Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries is a dazzling film-essay reminiscent of a cabinet of curiosities. In three stages and registers, the film offers a critical and poetic history of our relationships with the animal, mineral and plant realms. These worlds, which we think of as separate from the “human kingdom”, soon become connected, inviting us to rethink the organization of living things.

Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries is a journey through culture, science, and art, and a tribute to the often-overlooked realms of animals, plants, and minerals.
“Cinema invents new cages!”: so begins the first chapter, Bestiaries, where found footage intertwines with images filmed in a veterinary hospital. Through this archival voyage, we discover how animals, that Other shaped by the white gaze, have been central figures in cinema since its very inception. And how this compulsive drive to classify the animal kingdom, and the living world more broadly, has paradoxically accompanied the erosion of its diversity. Filming, after all, also involves taking. The second chapter, Herbaria, is a poetic, observational piece filmed in the botanical gardens of Padua: a quiet hymn to the restorative beauty of the plant world. Finally, Lapidaries, the third and final chapter, unfolds as an extended metaphor for the transformation of stone into collective memory. Just as seeds are preserved within herbaria, lapidaries disperse the memories of countless lives across time.
Katy Léna Ndiaye

Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries, 2024
War and Peace, 2020
Miraculous Spiral, 2016
The Never Ending Factory of the Duomo, 2015
Dark Matter, 2013
The Castle, 2011
Great Expectations, 2009
The Betrothed, 2007