INDIA, A LOVER'S PASSAGE: FRAGMENTS
Silvia Formiconi | 2013 | France | 53’ | EN subtitles

Filmed in 2003 during a two-month journey across India and edited over the course of ten years, this highly personal film is a sensory immersion in an astonishing country and seeks to uncover the truth of a situation and a moment of life. Surely the director had in mind what Louis Malle wrote regarding L'Inde fantôme: Reflexions sur un voyage, when she set off to discover India and its people with her camera, confident that what she seemed to film spontaneously by chance corresponded to something intangible that would appear in the footage, and reveal itself through the editing process.

Invited by her Indian friend to travel with him around his country, a Woman with a Movie Camera collects images and sounds that fascinate her. He becomes intrigued by her free and intimate way of filming which apparently has no other purpose than looking at the world and register the reality of the moment in order to save it as memory. While she takes visual notes for a possible film, he imagines a film about their own encounter, their story, potentially of love. She seems to resist this idea, yet keeps on filming. The tale of this couple unfolds in an elliptic and partial way. Another film will come to light, illuminated by a loving look. Impressionistic fragments snatched from oblivion, which are but traces of a story of love and passage.

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FAMILY PORTRAIT
Silvia Formiconi | 2014 | Italy | 52’ | EN subtitles

Born out of friendship and admiration for the three members of the Renzi family, this film is a cinematic tribute that merges footage filmed over a period of 15 years in Bologna, Fermo and Rome. Renzo Renzi (1919-2004), a key figure from Italy's rich film history and one of the founders of the Cineteca di Bologna,was a brilliant writer, intellectual and critic who was close to such masters of film as Fellini, Rossellini and Antonioni, among others. In this loving film portrait we hear him converse passionately about cinema, but also speaking proudly of the diary he kept for his daughter Lisetta when she was only 4 years old, when he began to notice that she already had a gift for profound and poetic formulations. His wife Teresa Curtarello Renzi (1929-2022), a pupil of Morandi, continues to create collages after her husband's death. Lisetta, the soul of this artistic family, reads from her father's forgotten diary. Collages made from old papers bearing the traces of time, paintings, old faded photographs, footage of the three family members, and lively tales are all interwoven by filmmaker Silvia Formiconi to resurrect a lost past.

Director Silvia Formiconi will be present for a Q&A following the screening.