The Italian hinterland is made up of faces, voices, ancient stories, and daily practices that draw on a network of echoes and assonances. While looking for points of connection and internal references, one can glimpse a self-portrait of a vital, secret country.
By mixing performance and autobiography, the protagonists of CANONE EFFIMERO thus bear witness to cultures that are still alive. Their vocal and musical techniques travel in time through oral passage. In the crafting of ancient and mysterious instruments is reflected the direct extension of the spirit of nature and the celestial order.
Faced with the tendency to file away the margins, with CANONE EFFIMERO, we try to re-focus our gaze on a little-known landscape. Bodies and landscapes are bound in a 1:1 format. The faces are Byzantine icons or medieval miniatures, the composition eschews the naturalism of documentary filmmaking and approaches statuary or painting.
The film thus lives on as autonomous portraits, artifacts unearthed and brought to light, illustrated pages of a collective diary, a fragile code to be completed.
Massimiliano and Gianluca De Serio
