Planet Earth, year 2960 AD. A group of uranium hunters returns to the blue planet in search of the precious metal. The crackling of the Geiger counter leads one team member deep into a cave. There, the explorer encounters an ancient relic from the old world, awakening it from a slumber that had lasted for centuries, perhaps millennia.
Country
ItalyYear
2025Length
19'
Category
ExperimentalScreenplay
Davide Palella, Sara Siniscalco, Martina ArrigoniEditing
Davide PalellaMusic
Sara SiniscalcoSound
Sara Siniscalco, Valerio Vigliar, Riccardo SpagnolProduction
Fondazione AAMODDistribution
Gargantua Film DistributionAcademic and educational context in which the short film was developped
Unarchive Suoni e VisioniSynopsis
Biography
Davide Palella graduated from NABA in 2019. Since then, he has made short films that have been screened at festivals such as the Locarno Film Festival, the Festival dei Popoli, and ZINEBI. Over the years, he has worked under the guidance of Michelangelo Frammartino and Pedro Costa, and has participated in development programs such as the Biennale College Cinema.
Statement
Uranium Hunters was born from a collaboration with Roman musician Sara Siniscalco during the UnArchive. Suoni e visioni artist residency organized by the AAMOD Foundation. Fundamental to this was the encounter with materials from the Enea collection—preserved at the National Archive of Corporate Cinema (CIAN)—and in particular, a short 1960 documentary showing uranium prospecting activities in Italy.
The image of this group of men in vintage clothing, equipped with futuristic gear used to “listen” to the Earth, inherently contained all the semantic ambivalence needed to give life to a sci-fi tale locked within the recursiveness of time. Amplifying the sensation of facing a past even more futuristic than our present was the footage related to the construction and use of the Mascot I° robot, a servomechanism designed by CNEN (the National Committee for Nuclear Energy).
But what happened to this lost future? How did utopia become uchronia?
— Davide Palella
Archival materials
Archival materials from the Archivio Nazionale Cinema Impresa in Ivrea.
Re Uranio (Enrico Franceschelli)
Mascot 1° (Enrico Moscatelli, 1959)
Cacciatori d’uranio (Pietro Antonelli, 1960)
Da uranio nasce uranio (Enrico Franceschelli, 1960)
Un automa per l’atomo (Enrico Moscatelli, 1962)
Il quarto stato della materia (Virgilio Tosi, 1967)
Other archive materials
The Outer Planets, Solar System Series Prehistoric Times – The World Before Time (1952)
RDS-37 Soviet Hydrogen Bomb Test (1955)
AN-602. RDS-202. (1961)
Radiation (1981)
Space Science – Comets, Meteors, Asteroids (1986)
Space Science – The Planets (1987)
