Archivi categoria: TFF 39 – 2021

JOANNA HADJITHOMAS E KHALIL JOREIGE

Article by Elio Sacchi

Translated by Federica Maria Briglia and Mattia Prelle

The cinema of Joanna Hadjithomas and Kalil Joreige – to whom the thirty-ninth edition of the Turin Film Festival dedicated a solo show and a masterclass, both curated by Massimo Causo – may lie between the beginning and the end of their artistic and cinematographic career. That means it is between the postcards of the opening credits of their first feature film, Around the Pink House (Al Bayt Al Zaher, 1999), and the box, the audiovisual archive of memory and remembrance that, like a very personal and foreign body, opens Memory Box (2021). Between these two extremes, within the more general framework of the history of Lebanon, of its destruction and of its reconstruction, there is a long and complex reflection on cinema, on the status of the image and, in particular, of the memory-image. When the past passes, the construction of a collective and shared memory becomes a difficult operation, which leaves enough room for memories and handy images that preclude the possibility of a complex narrative in favour of a superficial, conciliatory and pacifying narrative. This is what often happens after internal or fratricidal wars, which are followed by a reconstruction so fast that the past cannot be processed. This is also the case of Lebanon, considered the Switzerland of the Middle East in the 1960s: it was turned upside down first by a civil war and then by the conflict with Israel. The whole artistic parable of Hadjithomas and Joreige refers to this reality, and, in addition to cinema, crosses over into photography, performance arts and plastic arts. Their artistic parable contains its own moment of reflection and self-reflection. It is particularly evident in the performance Aida Sauve Moi, which makes explicit the questions that drive the expressive and creative urgency and necessity of the two directors: this is an indefinite and permeable border between reality and fiction, between personal experience and history. Their parable also contains the concept of latency, which is not only the physical, chemical and material concept of the negative impressed and never developed, but it also represents all the individual and particular latent stories, existing and never revealed, of the kidnapped and murdered Lebanese citizens, and of all the corpses that have never been found. Other elements included in their artistic parable include: the materiality of the image and of the testimonial object itself; the crossing and the attempt to take back public and collective spaces; and, finally, a boundless love for cinema. The last of these elements should be interpreted above all as an instrument of resistance and political commitment (in this regard, see Open the Door, Please [2006], a passionate and cinephile homage to the cinema of Jacques Tati). Joanna Hadjithomas and Kalil Joreige’s one is a self-reflexive cinema that also reflects on the status of the images it represents. This cinema has its genesis precisely in the overexposure to stereotyped images, whether they concern the civil war or the 1960s, as witnessed during the masterclass entitled Memory Work – Resistant Aesthetics in Hadjithomas & Joreige’s works (Rosita Di Peri also attended the event).

Actually, Around the Pink House has its origin in an earlier photographic project called Wonder Beirut. Hadjitomas and Joreige invented the figure of a Lebanese photographer, who immortalised Beirut in the 1960s and 1970s, before the civil war; the photographer then literally and materially burnt the buildings depicted on his postcards as they were bombed until the images were completely transfigured. The film does not tell the story of the Lebanese civil war, but rather the reconstruction of the capital in the 1990s, a period in which “the sound of bombs has given way to that of bulldozers” and in which the rubble shown in the background, physical and painful traces of a recent past, enters into a profound dialectic with the story of reconstruction and rebirth, which nonetheless involves the destruction of entire buildings. The maison rose itself is an archive of memory, of Lebanon’s history, a physical place that bears the marks of war, the memories of people who disappeared and the presence of refugees who were forced to leave their villages.


The maison rose is also an attempt done by a community to take its space back. This is the same public and collective space that Catherine Deneuve, the spirit of European cinema invoked in Lebanon as a foreign and empathetic body and led by Rabih Mrué (a recurring actor in the filmography of Hadjithomas and Joreige, he is a face that embodies the generational drama), wants to see but is prevented from doing so.
Je veux voir (2008) is a journey through a country devastated by the conflict with Israel. It stems from the need to show unconventional images (i.e. different from those broadcast by the various television stations) and to investigate new places, in a sort of palingenesis of the gaze and images of war. While in Rounds (2001), the wandering around the city – a Beirut that uses the rubble of buildings to build new roads by the sea – programmatically precludes the vision of public and city space, which is relegated to an off-screen that is always overexposed. Kiam 2000 – 2007, which began in 1999 and ended in 2008, is also the ideal counter-field to Je veux voir, since the detention camp described in it is an absolute off-screen narration, which can be only imagined by the human testimonies of the internees who invite us to reconstruct it in absentia. The film opens, once again, to an explicit reflection on memory. In 2006, in fact, the camp was turned into a museum and, still in 2006, was bombed by the Israeli army. Made almost entirely with rigorous close-ups and extreme close-ups, these vicissitudes gave rise to the need for Kiam: the urgency of the testimony necessarily refers to the camp, to its presence, it summons it and ultimately affirms its existence.


Their cinema is constantly in communication with the absence and the missing pictures, both personal, as in The Lost Film (Al Film Al Mafkoud, 2003), and collective (The Lebanese Rocket Society, 2012). And the ghost – as the directors admitted more than once – is a recurring figure in Lebanese culture and in its people’s daily life. A Perfect Day (Yawmoun Akhar, 2005) deals with ghost stories: piled up corpses in mass graves that no one discovered during the reconstruction of Beirut liven up and expand the story, claiming through a deafening silence their existence and death. This is a matter of faith and persistence of memory, because who believes in the ghost’s survival will be able to see it and reunite with it, whereas who tries to forget is forced to roam along the streets of a city that cannot be owned and cannot be seen (the contact lens do not adjust the sight, they rather produce a twisted and hallucinated vision of Beirut). Moreover, the film is based on the story of Joreige’s uncle, kidnapped during the war and still “missing”; one day, after many years, the directors found an undeveloped photo negative, a latent and phantasmal picture. The decision of transforming the negative-in-power into image-in-act corresponds to the desire of bringing back to light a unique and universal story, both personal and collective, through different concrete manipulations of the film. This story carries the marks of history, of the flow of time. Similarly, the city of Smirne is, in its reconstruction, a physical trace of the history passage: in Ysmirna (2016) the comparison between the early 1900s city map and the modern one shows the temporal distance of a mythical city, told by Joanna’s family and the one of the poet Etel Adnan (both of them have never been in the city of, respectively, their grandparents and parents), through an oral storytelling that intends to be a reenactment of a past in which one can find their roots.

Hadjithomas and Joreige’s more than twenty years of artistic activities and personal experiences break into a Lebanese family migrated to Canada, in the form of a big cardboard box. The package from Lebanon is an archive containing letters, photographs, notebooks, recordings of radio broadcastings and undeveloped films (Memory Box is freely inspired by the mailing correspondence that Joanna had with a friend of hers who migrated to Paris, suddenly interrupted after six years). This is an archive that causes the explosion of the underlying conflicts between the three different generations and, at the same time, it’s responsible for the deflagration of the film. Even if most of the films by Hadjithomas and Joreige have a material essence (and most of the films shown during the retrospective were projected in 35mm), Memory Box has a digital concept. Alex, the daughter, edits and manipulates the civil war testimonies according to her own grammar, which includes smartphones, instant communication, digital post-production and immateriality. The distance in space and time, and the reconstruction of the 1980s through their icons are not nostalgic at all, they are just needed to testimony and transfer the story. The intergenerational confrontation (the grandmother, Maia; the mother, who represents the directors’ generation; and the daughter) is about approaching the story of Lebanon, and thus becomes a matter of identity and belonging, that is opening up several possibilities of the storytelling for those generations that never experienced the conflict and whose memory may be lost.


The one of Joanna Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige is an artistically and conceptually coherent career that finds its raison d’être in the moral duty of making concretely, materially and visibly collective and public what the passage of the story of Lebanon has discolored, as if the past were an unimpressed and undeveloped film. An idea of political and civic cinema, a product of more than twenty years of activity that displays in the intergenerational confrontation of Memory Box the need to narrate the past in order to live the present and to imagine the future once again.

ITALIANA.CORTI

Article by Michelangelo Morello

Translated by Gianluca Zogno

Formation tales, foundfootage operations, a revisitation of fairy tales and ancient myths, metaphysical journeys through chaos’ shapeless masses; these are the themes around which Italian.Corti’s selection at the 39th Torino Film Festival is centered.

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“INMERSIÓN” BY NICOLÁS POSTIGLIONE

Article by Sara Longo

Translated by Giulia Baldo

The boat trip of a father with his two daughters will soon become a nightmare. This is the simple premise on which is built Inmersión, the debut feature film of Chilean director Nicolás Postiglione that investigates what’s underneath its characters. «It’s a shame that no one comes here anymore» comments the father, while observing with nostalgia the places where he grew up, now apparently deserted. And yet, the unstable balance of the three protagonists is definitely destroyed by the encounter with some castaways who, after being welcomed aboard, start to make the father seriously fear for his and his daughters’ lives.

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“LE MONDE APRÈS NOUS” DI LOUDA BEN SALAH-CAZANAS

Labidi deve consegnare il suo manoscritto a una casa editrice entro sei mesi, e l’unica cosa che riesce a scrivere, però, è il suo numero di telefono sulla sigaretta di una ragazza di cui si innamora a prima vista, Elisa. La storia d’amore che nasce tra loro riempie la vita del giovane protagonista ma non è affatto fonte di ispirazione letteraria. In effetti la concentrazione per scrivere un romanzo sulla guerra d’Algeria, paese d’origine della madre, sembra essere un obiettivo impossibile da raggiungere nelle condizioni in cui si trova. 

È difficile vivere a Parigi e riuscire a trovare lo spazio e il tempo per dedicarsi all’espressione creativa se provieni da una famiglia della classe lavoratrice, nonostante i tuoi genitori facciano il possibile per supportare il tuo sogno. Dormire a terra su un tappetino da fitness, e convivere in pochissimi metri quadri ti priva di qualsiasi comfort e intimità (l’interno della doccia è visibile dal letto). Fare il rider per un colosso del food delivery non offre alcuna soluzione, al massimo può garantire l’umiliazione di ritrovarsi faccia a faccia con un conoscente che può permettersi di dedicarsi full-time alla propria passione e che non vuole sforzarsi troppo per il pranzo. È possibile vivere una vita normale, in un bell’appartamento di Parigi, con la persona che ami, senza poterti permettere tutto ciò? Labidi ci prova con tutta la sfrontatezza del mondo, e in qualche modo ci riesce.

La passione per la letteratura e il suo estro creativo diventano “ottime skills” per vendere occhiali ai ricchi intellettuali parigini in un negozio alla moda. Qui però la frustrazione e l’infelicità dovute all’impossibilità di conciliare il lavoro, le relazioni e l’attività personale raggiungono livelli troppo alti. 

Salah-Cazanas riesce a comporre un’opera fortemente coinvolgente, che parla ai giovani cuori in crisi senza essere mai scontata. Grazie al carisma di Aurélien Gabrielli, incredibilmente autentico, è difficile non empatizzare e identificarsi nell’euforia sentimentale o nei momenti di totale apatia e disillusione che il film presenta. Non manca mai l’ironia che attraverso lo sguardo malinconico e ai gesti di Gabrielli si amplifica e arriva dritta al punto. Il picco emotivo del film, che coincide con la rinascita creativa dell’aspirante autore, contiene riflessioni non banali sul ruolo della famiglia e sui sogni e le ambizioni. Un film che trascende il conflitto tra boomers e millennials, che parla di classe disagiata e di seconde generazioni europee. Un film capace di dare speranza.

Francesco Caruso

“MLUNGU WAM” DI JENNA CATO BASS

Tsidi si trasferisce insieme a sua figlia nella villa dove vive e lavora la madre Mavis, che lavora da tempo immemore come domestica per la ricca proprietaria bianca. Le regole della villa sono semplici: bisogna essere invisibili e non fare alcun rumore. Ovviamente è vietato (anche allo spettatore) entrare nella camera dell’anziana good madam, perennemente a letto per la malattia che l’ha immobilizzata ma sempre “presente” in ogni angolo della casa. 

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“BETWEEN TWO DAWNS” BY SELMAN NACAR

Article by Luca Delpiano

Translated by Alexandra Oancea

In competition at the TFF39, the first feature film of the Turkish director Selman Nacar is an ethical and psychological drama that focuses on the process of change, fixing each of its smallest steps.

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“THE EDGE OF DAYBREAK” BY TAIKI SAKPISIT

Article by Davide Gravina

Translated by Rebeca Tirgovetu

The Incubator section of the TFF39 presents the first feature film by the Thailandese film director Taiki Sakpisit. Starting from a birthmark on the neck, moving on to the body of a half dead little girl, until arriving to a candid white dress, the director creates the gelid portrait of a deep inquietude transforming it in pure poetry.

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GIUSEPPE PICCIONI, PREMIO MARIA ADRIANA PROLO 2021

Il riconoscimento intitolato a Maria Adriana Prolo, fondatrice del Museo Nazionale del Cinema, quest’anno è stato assegnato a Giuseppe Piccioni. Un premio alla carriera, alla memoria dei suoi film, alle battaglie silenziose che questi hanno saputo raccontare.

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JOANNA HADJITHOMAS e KHALIL JOREIGE

Il cinema di Joanna Hadjithomas e Kalil Joreige – a cui la trentanovesima edizione del Torino Film Festival dedica una personale e una masterclass entrambe curate da Massimo Causo – può essere compreso tra l’inizio e la fine del loro percorso artistico e cinematografico, ovvero tra le cartoline dei titoli di testa del loro primo lungometraggio, Around the Pink House (Al Bayt Al Zaher, 1999), e la scatola, archivio audio-visivo del ricordo e della memoria che, corpo estraneo e così personale, apre Memory Box (2021). Tra questi due estremi, all’interno della cornice più generale della storia del Libano, della sua distruzione e della sua ricostruzione, si apre una lunga e complessa riflessione sul cinema, sullo statuto dell’immagine e, in particolare, dell’immagine-memoria.

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“LOS PLEBES” BY EDUARDO GIRALT ED EMMANUEL MASSU’

Article by Luca Delpiano

Translated by Lorenzo Papa

Los plebes, the documentary presented in TFF’s “The rooms of Rol” section, dives into the intimacy of young millennial sicarios who roam Sinaloa, Mexico, at the service of drug traffickers, showing their passions and hopes for the future. And, by dwelling on these budding assassins’ use of social media to recount their double lives, the story tries to question the media and offers a profound reflection on death.

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“ANOTHER BRICK ON THE WALL” DI ZHANG NAN

Nel 1977 in Cina, pochi mesi dopo la caduta di Mao Tse-tung e il successivo riassemblamento del Partito Comunista Cinese, una valle poco distante dalla città-prefettura di Tangshan, nella provincia dello Hebei, viene sommersa per creare una diga artificiale che possa rifornire d’acqua la vicina grande città. Sott’acqua, però, non finiscono solo le case e i negozi sgomberati, ma anche un intero tratto della Grande Muraglia, il monumento che più di ogni altro, forse, caratterizza la Cina agli occhi del mondo. Quarant’anni dopo la costruzione della diga, alcuni abitanti locali, constatando la miseria delle condizioni di una porzione della Muraglia sulle alture circostanti, decidono di mettere su un’operazione di restauro atta a donare nuovo lustro al millenario monumento.

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“PIANO LESSONS” BY ANTONGIULIO PANIZZI

Article by Sara Longo

Translated by Alexandra Oancea

Piano Lessons is a moving experience, a whirling swirl of emotion, which finds in the documentary cinema its preferred medium to blow out. It is about the almost unknown story of German Diez Nieto, musician and virtuoso concert pianist, who abandoned the stage to devote himself exclusively to teaching music.

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“JANE PAR CHARLOTTE” BY CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG

Article by Lisa Cortopassi

Translated by Federica Maria Briglia

«Filming you with the camera is just an excuse to watch you», says Gainsbourg Birkin, with a sweet and quiet tone, during one of the first scenes of Jane Par Charlotte. The movie premiered at the 74th edition of Cannes Film Festival and was proposed again at the TFF39 in the “Surprise” section. It immediately crosses the cold boundaries of the biographic documentary, taking the form of an intimate and very lively conversation between mother and daughter. There lies the hiatus between these two identities which, like the hiatus between biography and autobiography, becomes more and more ephemeral, until it involves also Joe, Charlotte’s youngest daughter.

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“ITALIA, IL FUOCO E LA CENERE” BY OLIVIER BOHLER AND CÉLINE GAILLEURD

Article by Alice Ferro

Translated by Mirko Giumentaro

Italia, il fuoco e la cenere is a poetic and oneiric journey through the divas, ghosts, lights, and shadows of Italian silent cinema. It explores its most material essence, it brings its lantern closer to the flesh, the bodies, the bare shoulders in the half-light, the penetrating gazes, the feverish convulsions of the divas. The erotic component is central: cinema made the prudes tremble, in the darkened rooms it allowed women and men to blend. The cinematic exploration becomes a historical exploration and paints the reality of a country in constant transformation, from the pompous and resplendent scenes to the decadence and abyss of fascism that are inexorably approaching.

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“GROSSE FREIHEIT” BY SEBASTIAN MEISE

Article by Giulia Seccia

Translated by Elena Soldà

A match that lights up in complete darkness. This is the symbol on which Grosse Freiheit / Great Freedom, a film directed by Sebastian Meise in competition at the Torino Film Festival stands. It won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes, and it will be presented by Austria as an Oscar candidate 2022.

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“FEATHERS” BY OMAR EL ZOHAIRY

Article by Michelangelo Morello

Translated by Benedetta Di Fiore and Rebeca Tirgovetu

The first work by Egyptian director Omar El Zohairy was presented in competition at the 39th edition of Torino Film Festival. The film is a vehement criticism of the male domination of Egyptian society which leads to a dark comedy with gloomy humour, acquiring increasingly absurd tones.

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“BLOOD ON THE CROWN” BY DAVIDE FERRARIO

Article by Marco Ghironi

Translated by Francesca Schiavello

June 7th, 1919: the small nation of Malta refuses to be dominated again by the British Empire, reaffirming the desire for independence. And among the city’s ravines, the roofs of the houses and the squares of the island off the coast of Sicily, blood begins to flow when the British commence firing and begin to impose their law.

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“ALONERS” BY HONG SEONG-EUN

Article by Valentina Velardi

Translated by Mattia Prelle

Jina (Geong Seung-yeon), an exemplary employee in a credit card company’s call centre, is a bashful and reserved girl, strictly attached to her habits and to the peaceful succession of places and acts that mark her days, which she divides between her little apartment and the workplace.

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“TASTE” BY LÊ BAO

Article by Annaisa Quarto

Translated by Francesca Luna Lombardo

Premiered in the Encounters section of the last Berlinale, where it won the Special Jury Prize, Taste, the first feature film by Vietnamese director Lê Bao arrives at TFF39 in the Out-of-Competition/TFLAB section.

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