VILLA ROMANA - HOME
VILLA ROMANA - HOME

On view from February – April 2017

EYES WIDE OPEN

A selection of videos on migration and border crossings

This is a selection of 17 videos with lengths from 59 seconds to 57 minutes. Part of them reached us on an Open Call, part of them we knew already or have shown on other occasions.

This film program came out of a collaboration within the transnational GRAVITY FOR ALL network – an attempt to bring artists who just arrived in Europe in closer contact with those who are already living here and viceversa. All these 16 films are now online and for free for the next three months.

We would be happy if you could spread this program / mail to all your friends who are interested in listening to different voices, following the gazes of others and who maybe are interested to express themselves in future projects.

If you want to participate in the next edition or just want to be updated in time, please send us a message (gravity@villaromana.org) or post on facebook: gravityforall.

*Vittoria Soddu, Back Hill - tales from a parish house

2014 (36’)

London 1984, the first victim of the AIDS epidemic was a young Italian convict, one of Father Carmelo’s “ragazzi” - a group of youngsters who sought rescue within the immigrant community of the Italian church of St Peter’s on Back Hill. Through a long forgotten archive of photographs, the histories and presence of the ragazzi within the domestic space of the parish house is reactivated in a fragmented narrative, which mirrors the structure of the building itself – embodying the tales of Carmelo, protagonist and sole beholder of this memory.


*Raphael Sbrzesny, Castel Volturno

2010 (4’10’’)

In his performative video, Sbrzesny uses the drum as a kind of voice representing the manifold voices of migrants who, year by year, try to make their passage across the sea to start a new life in Italy. Set near Naples, in the depressing coastal town of Castel Volturno, the work deals with lost hopes and asks questions about the possibility of artistic interventions.


*Nadine Al Lahham, Instable

2015 (2’30’’)

"If you were free to choose then you wouldn‘t be where you are." The movie reflects the situation of Nadine Al Lahham during the last years moving from place to place, from Syria to Malaysia, from Malaysia to Lebanon, from Lebanon to Turkey not being in control of anything about herself or the location. It is an instable life and she still is looking for a place to stay.

https://vimeo.com/116361112


*Moawia Shannan, To a Friend

2015 (1’06’’)

To a Friend is a video taken in one single shot. The actor of the movie is Moawia himself as well as the narrator of the Arabic poem. When Moawia was walking along this alley in Istanbul he was remembering his home in Damascus. The movie is about his memory and the missing friend.

https://vimeo.com/116245294


*Marianna Christofides, dies solis. Sundays in Nicosia

2010 (56’40’’)

Sundays in Nicosia; thousands of labour migrants from Sri-Lanka, India, the Philippines and Vietnam spend together their only day off. During the week they are almost never present in public. The film observes the course of this day over a time span of a year. Sunday follows Sunday, we are there, at their ceremonies and rituals, whilst preparing meals and playing games. The meeting points of the women lie between two borders, on the one hand the Venetian wall, once separating town from land, on the other the UN-Bufferzone which divides the city and the island in north and south. An otherwise mute place shines in a new light - dies solis.


*Justin Randolph Thompson,
Tempus Tacendi (A Time for Silence)

2016 (9’02’’)

Tempus Tacendi (A Time for Silence) is an experimental short based on Vincenzo Martini‘s Misantropia nella Società (Misanthropy in Society) and Ezra Pound´s The Cantos. The work explores an inter-generational conversation around migration and the fragility of aspirations. Vincenzo Martini was the father of the Italian Governor of Colonial Eritrea and his comedies based on the elitist aristocracy provide the basis for a conversation between an Eritrean immigrant and an American Immigrant both having arrived in Italy in the same period. Employing reality as a formal device, this conversation is juxtaposed against a fragment of Ezra Pound‘s The Cantos, reflecting upon capitalism and notions of stereotypical predatory blackness through the figure of Louis Till (Emmett Till‘s father executed by the US army in Pisa, Italy).


*Hyacynthe Ndongo, The Prayer

2010 (3’48’’)

Invited to a business dinner, Kamdem doesn‘t know how to use the western cutlery. He lives a living hell, when one of his colleagues who is also his cousin asked to bless the meal in mother tongue and so, getting the opportunity to explain Kamdem how to use the covered and avoid him the ridiculous.


*Francesca Banchelli, Antitesi Popolare

2008 (9’43’’)

Antitesi Popolare approaches the subject of migration and transgression from different perspectives, those of human beings and those of birds. A group of young people tries to follow the cormoran birds along the Arno river. They do it in a very innocent way. The cormorans on their way South follow the rivers, hunting fishes, sleeping in the trees.


*Duccio Ricciardelli, Porto Sonoro

2015 (5’36’’)

Porto Sonoro is a kind of anti-narrative film, a travel into the audio-visual reality of the port of Genoa. At the same time it is a homage to two historical films: Walter Ruttmann´s Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Großstadt and Jean Vigos A propos de Nice.


*Caterina Pecchioli, Neverland

2013 (4’34’’)

"I chose to repeat myself what is and has been the journey of many migrants on the coast of Pantelleria, in the same place that Garcia Marquez describes as a moonscape." Emerges from this action a video on migration as a constant search for a real and imaginary place where to land. The unstable soil of volcanic rocks makes the action complex, like the path that leads you to leave and to return, looking of a place to be and of themselves.


*Caterina Pecchioli, Chalk line

2008 (4’)

Just with a chalk line Caterina isolated an ants community inside its own territory. The fact that most of the ants don’t cross the line brings to a division of the community that effects the all organization, bringing to ineffective and self-destructive behaviors. Nature mechanisms are used in the video to reflect on nations territories separations and use of control and fear.


*Batool Mohamad, I Love Death

2014 (5’)

The revolutionary movement of Syria has not only been asking for a political change when it took the streets in 2011, but also to reaffirm the existence of individuality in society. Our personal individuality was brutally oppressed by the dictatorial one-party ruling and the purely state-controlled organizations and trade unions, striving to ideologically uniform the people from the youngest age in the Baath Pioneer Organization.

https://vimeo.com/201290492


*Bassil Halabi & Mohammad Fares,
Beyond the Station

2015 (5’)

The two authors selected a suitcase as a symbol for migration: there is someone who is putting himself in a suitcase as they did when they left Syria and came to Turkey. It is not the country they came to by their decision or their selection. They are carrying all their history with them.

https://vimeo.com/116324834


*Babak Inaloo & Ali Hagooi, The Bridge

2016 (9’37’’)

My name is Babak Inaloo, from Tehran / Iran, I am 26 years old, student of mathematics in Iran and for the moment study French in Lille. I‘m an asylum seeker in France. I also write poem and text, I make movie and documentary as well.


*Babak Inaloo, Refugee

2016 (59’’)

My name is Babak Inaloo, from Tehran / Iran, I am 26 years old, student of mathematics in Iran and for the moment study French in Lille. I‘m an asylum seeker in France. I also write poem and text, I make movie and documentary as well.


*Andrea d'Amore with Martino Chiti & Ciboideale, Hope

2015 (8’03’’)

Hope is a permanent installation, visible only at night. An itinerary marked with phosphorescent paint on the Path of Hope, a route historically crossed to evade custom controls between Italy and France (the so-called Death Pass). The path comes to a halt in front of a wall of barbed wire at the border between the two states. Hope was installed during the days in which hundreds of immigrants settled on the rocks of Ventimiglia, when the flow of migration was blocked through French customs at Menton, summer of 2015. A video documents both the installation and the world built by the immigrants during their stay on the rocks.


*Adel Qaqili, This is Why

2015 (2’18’’)

In an attempt of explanation, Qaqili takes us to an everyday street scene in an unspecified town in Syria. Arbitrarily, the viewer gets into passport control by two armed militiamen followed by a monologue of interrogation and accusation. Without getting the chance for defence, the situation escalates quickly while we are demonstrated an accurate picture of military despotism and repression.

https://vimeo.com/133887138


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