Bring the Archive into the World
In 2022, Archivio Aperto inaugurates the first Italian competition dedicated to contemporary international found footage works. The new program is intertwined with the history of the festival and the numerous out-of-competition programs dedicated to the history of experimental cinema and the valorization of archival images. Archivio Aperto aims to be a true archival laboratory, training hub and space for reflection on the public use of private images.
Bring the Archive into the World. It is a generative and creative idea that has guided us in this 15th edition of Archivio Aperto, which inaugurates the first competitive section for found footage features and shorts, made from archival, often private, images. The surprising result of the international call launched in this edition is not only the incredible quality of the selected works – 16 titles including feature and short films, from 15 countries around the world and in many cases Italian premieres – but a real semantic reversal. On closer inspection, in fact, the world is returned to us through the archives. The reuse of private images in contemporary documentary and experimental works is more and more, in fact, a political act as well as an artistic fact, increasingly charged with social and cultural implications. Found footage works teach us to sink our gaze into the dimension of the private and the removed and to make the past resonate in the present in order to rethink it, recode it, transform it. Through private stories that become public, micro-stories that illuminate subjectivities, events, spaces and relationships long invisible, the use of found footage overturns the cages of representation and opens us to what appears to be a visual revolution.
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Credits
Artistic Direction
Paolo Simoni in collaboration with Vanessa MangiavaccaProgramming
Mirco Santi, Giulia Simi, Gabriele Gimmelli, Madison Moore, César Ustarroz, Lucia Tralli, MicheleManzolini, Claudio Giapponesi, Milo AdamiCompetition film selection
Sergio Fant, in collaboration with André Habib and Rossella CataneseOrganization
Lucia PrincipePress Office
Luciana Apicella1970
Tomasz Wolski
Through archival recordings and animations, viewers are able to observe the various interlocking power systems that marked Poland’s history in 1970.
Animal Macula
Sylvain L’Espérance
Animal Macula plunges us into the heart of a sprawling and winding network where animals transform as they move from one sequence to another, all drawn from 125 years of cinema.
Condition d’élévation
State of Elevation
Isabelle Prim
A quest’s story brings together both archives and fiction with rare stylistic refinement and humor.
Cны из левого глаза
Dreams from the Left Eye
Stanislav Bagdia
An experimental sketch based on the life of Oleg Prusov, a young artist and poet from Vitebsk (Belarus) who lived at the end of the 20th century.
Écoutez le battement de nos images
Listen to the Beat of our Images
Audrey Jean-BaptisteMaxime Jean-Baptiste
Combining field investigation and video-editing processes on archives, Listen to the Beat of Our Images gives a voice to an invisibilized and silenced population.
Filmski dnevnici
Film Diaries
Milica JovčićNenad Ćosić
Based on 9,5mm found footage filmed by Belgrade cineamateurs between the two world wars, this film looks into the private family archive as a reflection of Yugoslav history.
Home When You Return
Carl Elsaesser
An experimental melodrama inspired by the films of amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin made in the 1950s and by autobiographical references.
Journal d’Amérique
American Journal
Arnaud des Pallières
A visual and sound fresco exploring American stories from the 20th century, compiled entirely from archive footage from the American Prelinger collection.
نظربازی
Nazarbazi
Maryam Tafakory
Nazarbazi, literally the play of glances, is a film about love and desire in Iranian cinema.
Красная Африка
Red Africa
Alexander Markov
After gaining independence in the early 1960s, the young African nations are greeted by an unexpected and enigmatic friend from a far-off continent: Soviet parliamentarians arrive in an endless stream, paying visits to Africa’s new leaders.
Sensitive Material
Nataliya Ilchuk
50-year-old Lilia talks about her mental trauma due to her parents’ constant quarrels during childhood, while her mother justifies her lack of love with the rigid frames of a totalitarian society.
Teorema de Tiempo
Time Theorem
Andrés Kaiser
Years after the death of grandmother Anita, Andrés Kaiser inspected the old building where she and grandfather Arnoldo worked all their lives as printers. The images revealed their secret profession as amateur filmmakers.
Terra dei Padri
Fathers’ Land
Francesco Di Gioia
A journey by sea and overland is punctuated by alternating rhyming verses. These are poems by Fadil Hasin Ash-Shalmani that add to a little documented historical fact: the deportation of numerous civilians in the early years of the Italian occupation of Libya.
The Kiev Trial
Sergei Loznitsa
Sergei Loznitsa reconstructs key moments of the Kiev Trial, that took place in January of 1946 in the Soviet Union and was one of the first post-war trials convicting German Nazis and their collaborators.
Viagem ao Sol
Journey to the Sun
Ansgar SchaeferSusana de Sousa Dias
Immediately after World War II, 5,000 children were sent from Austria to stay for a short time with host families in Portugal, where they could recover from the violence of the war.
Xaraasi Xanne
Crossing Voices
Raphaël GriseyBouba Touré
Xaraasi Xanne recounts the exemplary adventure of Somankidi Coura, an agricultural cooperative created in Mali in 1977 by western African immigrant workers living in workers’ residences in France.
Archivi Vivi / Giorgio Lolli Collection – Sergio Borelli Collection
This section is dedicated to the presentation of film and video collections restored and digitised by Home Movies.
Archivio Aperto Atlas / Canada
Archivio Aperto Atlas is the new section of the festival dedicated to exploring found footage cinema from other countries. For the 2022 edition, Archivio Aperto explores the ways of archival reuse in Canada thanks to the programme curated by Madison More, Canadian filmmaker, researcher and archivist.
Bring the Archive into the World Live
A program of seven short films and archive excerpts scored live. The section is intended as a possible culmination of a two decades long experience of soundtracking under the Home Movies stamp. During this long time, numerous collaborations with several musicians have taken place with a focus on experimenting around the convergence of archival images and contemporary sounds and on performing the archive.
Carte blanche – Found Footage Magazine
Founded in 2015, and published in English, Found Footage Magazine is a print film journal distributed worldwide. It offers theoretical, analytical and informative content related to the reuse and repurposing of extant media in moving-image art.
Celebrating Jonas Mekas 100
In 2022, Lithuania and the world celebrate the life and work of Jonas Mekas, one of the country’s most prominent cultural figures of the 20th and 21st centuries and a global cultural phenomenon in his own right, considered by many to be the “godfather of avant-garde cinema.”
Experimental Stories
Marie Menken: A seminal filmmaker in the history of the avant-garde cinema in film projection. Fabio Giorgi Alberti: An artist of the present day.
Found Footage Italia / Carola Spadoni
Found Footage Italia is the new out of competition space of Archivio Aperto dedicated to archival projects by Italian artists and researchers. In collaboration with MAMbo — Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, we present, for the first time in Italy, The Peripatetic Film & Video Archive by Carola Spadoni.
Poetry, diaries, novels. Home movies and literature / Annie Ernaux
The format Poetry, diaries, novels. Home movies and literature weaves the thread between memoirs on film and the experience of writers who have focused, more than others, on the theme of words as an investigation of personal histories, the fragments of private life that together constitute the mosaic of our collective history. Past, present, and future.
Terra Femme
Composed entirely of archival material and home movies from the 1920s to the 1940s, Terra Femme explores the emancipatory power women found in newly available personal cameras, and the association this self-expression had with gender roles, the rise of a leisured, white middle class, and imperialism.