Tonino De Bernardi
"The Man With The Golden Eye" tells the extraordinary figure of Marco Melani through a live projection of materials collected in over ten years of research. Found footage, unpublished interviews with cinema and television personalities, fragments of films, extracts from television programs, photographs, readings and interventions by the author, intertwine giving voice to a chorus of precious testimonies.
The film is a rendition of Resurrection, Tolstoy’s last novel. It begins with a reading of the beginning of the first part in Naples, in September 2012. It moves on to Berlin, Locarno 2013, Oneglia, Paris, Casalborgone, and it ends in Milan with the beginning of the second part. The places and times change, and so do the people doing the reading. But also, in the middle, real people and voices surface, like Adamo Vergine at his home and Jean François Neplaz in Marseilles. The film searches for the possible faces of Tolstoy’s two protagonists in Oneglia, Procida, and Casalborgone.
Italian director Tonino De Bernardi, a regular guest at IFFR, filmed on the Greek island Evia (or Euboea) during the refugee crisis. Many immigrants arrived on the Greek islands, as well as in Italy. De Bernardi also filmed the border town Ventimiglia, where refugees play football and queue up for aid in a parking lot.
A whole summer long, Portuguese filmmaker Teresa Villaverde stayed with Italian cult director Tonino De Bernardi, who was working on projects including a film version of Sophocles’ Electra starring only local villagers. She sits at the table with the family in their garden, on the back seat of the car on the way home in the evening or listens to the stories told by the woman De Bernardi buys cheese and eggs from.
This last short of Tonino De Bernardi is a meditative film about his life and cinema: he recovers an experimental short film made in the 60s and sticks in the final part of the film a sequence with his grandson - a line of continuity between Tonino's cinema and grandson's life.
Docu-fiction about prostitution and the state of Europe.
“Why did you kill her?” Lou asks Philippe again. The life-odyssey of Joana, a modern-day Moll Flanders, continues as she moves through different times and places, like the stations of a personal via crucis, with occasional leaps into the present. From Paris to Rome and on to São Paulo. The body has lost every value, except the economic one.
A quest for the identity of the mysterious Madame Butterfly. While the farmers till the land, she waits in distress for her American love Pinkerton, who promised to be reunited with her.
Irene moves to Paris to begin a new life with her husband Jason and their two daughters, but an act of betrayal and her desire for revenge soon sends her to the brink of madness.
Betty, a famous brasilian 'telenovelas' star, is in search of her twin sister Marlene, who vanished when the kids were four years old (Marlene is now a prostitute). Fragments of other stories, like that of an italian traveller Filippo who left in Italy Giuli, pregnant, and claims to have a split-personality, are inter-twined with the main one
“A film of glimpses of ordinary persecution or exploitation, fragments of a love speech, that is, from different states of ordinary injustice. A film wandering from one latitude to another in the rejection of a definition. The spring for filming disparity and exploitation, social and not only, plus the irrepressible personal desire to film, testify, and overflow." – Tonino De Bernardi
This is a story about a Neapolitan guy, Antonello, immigrant in Turin, who, for a living, hooks on the street as Rosatigre. Sasà, a friend of his, tries to bring him back to Naples, but, after a tortured decision, Antonello chooses to come back North and to keep living “on the street”.
This musical drama (most of the dialogue is sung) concerns a diverse group of people brought together in a city in Italy. Pina (Isabel Ruth) was born in Portugal but now lives in poor circumstances in Naples. Pina has two daughters, Rosa (Iaia Forte), who has been wearing a wedding dress since she was left stranded at the altar several years ago, and Caterina (Galatea Ranzi), who murdered a man who wronged her as he left the church following his wedding. Caterina winds up in prison alongside Maddalena (Anna Bonaiuto), a prostitute who witnessed the murder and was inspired to kill a man in her own life who had hurt her. The incidents from these women's lives are interspersed with another story, set in 1929 and filmed in black-and-white, about a man who shoots his wife in a movie theater and must run to avoid the police. Filmed on location in Naples, with non-professionals as extras, Appassionate was screened as part of the 1999 Venice Film Festival.
A woman in her flooded kitchen thinks of Ophelia and death by drowning. A nun wonders about her vocation. A girl, dumb by choice, walks around in Naples. A ballerina in a wheelchair. Three youths around a bonfire in a little island. A man secluded in a tower waiting for the end of the world. And many other stories.
Italian film-maker Tonino De Bernardi meets in rural Liguria an old countrywoman, Agnese, and her chickens.
Tonino De Bernardi was an underground filmmaker from 1967 to 1983.
Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.
Shot between Italy and New York City, Warming Up is the journal of a season of creativity. The film-maker and his characters improvise scenes and sequences, and wonder how to make up a story as they go along. The recurring theme is how to make the world (or read it as) an imaginative place...
A conclusion and recapitulation of the Eryngium cycle, Coda deals directly with the theme of self-portraiture. The first shot alludes to the end of Erichvon Stroheim's Foolish Wives, where the corpse of the hero-director is dispatched in a man-hole. Other dramatic self-portraits follow: Caravaggio's Goliath, Dante's Sestina (read by the film-maker), and Dürer's Self-portrait with Eryngium. The abandoned villa of Migrazione is revisited. But the finale is hopeful.
This is the third and most extensive part of the cycle Eryngium. The essential theme is the migrations that have populated our world, starting from ancient India and descending into Greece and Western Europe.The film’s conceit is that this movement is still in progress. The characters are shown in transit, as if they were part of an ancient caravan. While they move they make up myths and they worship the Great Goddess,impersonating her story. Thus she appears as young girl and mature woman, and is evoked in the stories and music given on the soundtrack: the Virgin of Bach’s Magnificat, the Sulamite of Stockhausen’s Song of Solomon (“I am black but comely”), tales by Herodotus, Kafka, Villon (as set to music by Ezra Pound). A section is devoted to the idea of celebration, where the migrants get together to worship the life-principle. Later the film moves back to the individual and solitude.
The first part, composed of close-ups of faces shot at a sharp angle from below, takes place at the top of a ladder, where Pistoletto creates an ornate collar and a long cloak of cellophane that wraps Maria Pioppi. The action shifts then to the ground, where the images of several men stripped to the waist (including the artist Plinio Martelli) blend with those of two nude women dancing in the surface of a mirror work by Pistoletto himself, inspired by a famous photographic sequence of Eadweard Muybridge.
Short made for double parallel projections, for which Allen Ginsberg said that it's his favorite underground European film, debut from the director, cheeky hommage to B-movies.
A Neopolitan hustler named Antonello is living his life in Torino. He turns tricks as a transvestite, using the name Rosatigre, or more commonly, Rosa. His closest pal is Wanda, who exercises the same “profession” and, being his best friend, is also the incarnation of his feminine alter ego. While we watch the two of them hanging out on the street, sweet and carefree as the young Moll Flanders, we eavesdrop on their exchange of confidences and learn the secret details of their private lives. Wanda could have been a teacher but she preferred the street, where she can indulge her sentimental, dreamy nature in sighing over the "Americano" she once met in Naples, for whom she still carries a torch.
