Walls and Borders – Part 3

STAINES is a journey. From Baghdad to Chernobyl, passing through Kabul, Beirut, and Bosnia. A story accompanied by the chords of an acoustic guitar and marked by the crucial places of an invisible border, between war and peace, violence and contamination. Between the dark and the illuminated.

A woman entrusts her secret to a man. An incurable wound, which, thanks to listening, sometimes stings a little less.

With an old white scooter and a wooden box full of grocery bags, Sara, like every day, makes the rounds of the elderly to whom she delivers groceries to their homes.

Arms of salvation or bars of restraint, spiritual barricades or release valves, passageways to sublime or jaws of repression, travel checkpoints or thresholds of transcendence, feeding hands or delivery limiters, walls against escapism or delimiting borders. Arms and bars control passages.

Arms of salvation or bars of containment, spiritual barricades or safety valves, paths to the sublime or jaws of repression, passenger customs or thresholds of transcendence, hands that nourish or limit liberation, walls against escape from reality or demarcating borders. Arms and bars control passages.

The subjective view of a crossing. An external and internal journey, in an impressionistic vein.

The video is a summary of a long interview that Luana Rovini gave me before her death in April 2009, about her experience as a terminally ill cancer patient.

In a seemingly borderless city, three young people of three different nationalities meet, or chase each other, without ever meeting. Sunil arrives from Bangalore to participate in the Democracy Biennale. He runs a nonprofit organization that focuses on updating intellectual property laws and new technologies. Marcia is English, lives in Turin, and works for the magazine that invited Sunil. Sabine, a friend of Sunil and Marcia, is French, an artist, and even though she never meets her friends, she always manages, in her own way, to be present.

At a café table, Claudia engages in a heated discussion with her friend Sofia. She tries to explain her thoughts, the reason for her outrage, and her desire to do something to help those who, far from their everyday surroundings, are truly in need. Her world, compared to the problems of the rest of the world, feels too small for her. Sofia's words and her attempts to explain that she certainly can't change things are in vain. Two points of view, two thoughts that can sometimes coexist within each of us, are revealed here in their dialectic, in the friendly clash between two ordinary girls.

Gypsy Dreams: A video-artistic documentation project launched inside the V. Germagnano gypsy camp in Turin.

The last letter to the fiancée of Bruno Cibrario (nom de guerre Nebiolo), a communist partisan shot at the age of 21 against the wall of the Martinetto shooting range in Turin.

Lori sleeps restlessly: a state of inertia keeps her restrained...

Interview with Somasundaram Paskaran, a survivor of the Sri Lankan civil war.

The title is (almost) the same as that of a group of Franz Kafka's short stories. It's only for this, and for the dizzying enormity of the work evoked here, that I owe him for this film. For the fact that he existed at all, however, my gratitude remains infinite.

The two "doubts," graphically expressed in Latin and Arabic characters and representing the two shores of the Mediterranean with their two cultures, depending on their position can form a black awareness ribbon, a symbol of mourning, or a heart, as it appears at the end of the video. It all depends on the perspective from which you observe them and, also, on their relative position, as they are in motion. It's a question of perspective.

The desire to gather, from someone who has lived, traveled, fought, and suffered a great deal, elements of experience about "walls." Real ones, which come after—and before—the metaphorical ones. Prisons. Our cultural barriers. Historically detrimental to the female element. Marginalized then and now. Inside and outside prisons and social constraints. Told by those confined to a home they love, but cannot abandon. And, through the use of split screen, the description of a prism of experiences and suffering, in its gestures, with the interpretative code of communication, analog and digital, as the hallmark of a life spent toward an ideal dimension.

Against the sun-drenched wall of the former San Salvi psychiatric hospital in Florence, the shadows of trees move off-camera, while a double voice—it has a kind of echo within it—repeats words written by a patient admitted there in the 1960s.

The short film is loosely based on excerpts from Barbara Garlaschelli's book "FRAMMENTS. STORIES FROM A FORTINO DI PERIFERIA", published by Moby Dick (in the "I saggi Moby Dick" series), from which fragments of an interview with Matteo, one of the patients at the Milan psychosocial center, have been reinterpreted.

No walls, a man and a wall in an ancestral rite made of struggle, tears, prayer, bandages, death.

Often following the same patterns, power opposes the demands of peace, freedom, and defense of the vulnerable. The most bloodthirsty and uncivilized policies are justified by false stereotypes and lies. Those, like Giuseppe Pinelli and Roberto Franceschi, who were killed for fighting against discrimination and for respect for humanity, continue to provide courage and positive inspiration even in the darkest periods of history.

The illegal immigrant is an outsider who exists in a legislative and cultural spatial border zone. The illegal immigrant doesn't exist, but it concerns us all.

A homeless woman receives a gesture of solidarity from a Nigerian woman. The immigrant offers her a plate of food she has just cooked for herself and her family. The homeless woman, despite her neediness, doesn't trust what's on her plate; she smells it but nothing more. Her preconceptions about the "unknown" are evidently stronger than her hunger. She sets the plate on the floor and, forgetting about it, resumes her begging. But suddenly, someone absentmindedly kicks the plate. The gesture draws the woman's attention to the plate and its contents, piquing her curiosity, and she decides to try the strange concoction. After a few bites, she realizes that the food is good, indeed, very good. The African woman, with a small gesture of solidarity, and the homeless woman with a small effort, have, at least for a moment, broken down one of the biggest walls: that of mistrust.

Mostar... The scorching wind sweeps through the deserted streets. A few stray cats fight for control of the garbage. I think we should start asking ourselves what legacy we will leave to future generations.

Thirty years after the Basaglia Law, our film aims to recount the experience of a time that seems to be returning.
The closure of the Novara asylum meant, then, the end of a tragic and desolate place that, with its climate of violence and oppression, with its total frustration of basic needs, with its often inhumane living conditions, instead of healing, paradoxically created pathology.
Our short documentary "passes" through old corridors, abandoned rooms, and rediscovered objects that, thanks to the voices of the medical records of the time, bring back memories of never-forgotten suffering.
The closure of the asylum was therefore an act of courage born from a widespread atmosphere of concern and defense towards the weak, the insane, and those who were different. An atmosphere far removed from today's culture, which is proving increasingly sensitive to power relations rather than relationships of support, ready to marginalize, out of fear, those who, with their madness, inevitably remind us that their emotions, desires, thoughts, and fears are ultimately the emotions, desires, thoughts, and fears that live in the deepest regions of our hearts and minds.
This is why we believe it is appropriate to remember, once again, the mental asylum, once a place of confinement and suffering, now a tragic metaphor for exclusion.

A contemporary interpretation of some key concepts of the Hagakure (the Samurai code), developed by a practitioner of Parkour, the urban discipline whose aim is to move as efficiently as possible by overcoming obstacles and tracing seemingly impossible paths.