Painters recognize his superiority in literature and writers praise his artistic greatness: in both cases the skill of Carlo Levi is always discussed.
Lucus in Lucendo. A Proposito di Carlo Levi wants to tell the current events of one of the most influential intellectuals of the 20th century, to spread and transmit its cultural universe. The body and narrative voice of the film is Stefano Levi Della Torre, painter and nephew of Carlo, engaged in the search for a subject for his blank canvas that can contain the symbols of Levi’s political and artistic commitment. A research that takes him between Piedmont, Paris, Lucania, Rome, on a physical and interior journey into the Levian world during the most difficult years in Italian history, years that Carlo lived and told with his art.
Writer – world-famous for the masterpiece Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, and other important novels and essays – painter, doctor, politician by passion condemned to confinement, anthropologist and poet by vocation.
The film follows his different tensions and returns to make a current and more than original, unique voice heard.
Director’s notes
The research for the documentary was born in Basilicata, an introverted place that for years we have experienced as an observatory on the contemporary world. If at first it was the taste for a certain type of ordinary landscape that moved us, then anthropological, literary and social history motivations were stratified. Then came my season back in Lucania, when I moved to an abandoned hamlet to study its ruined architecture. That village was located in the geography of Carlo Levi’s confinement, where characters and atmospheres were still very vivid. Thus was born a search not only towards my roots, but also a pretext to discover a line that extends from southern Italy to France and which passes through the central place of my education: Turin. In this discovery of the Levian legacy, Stefano Levi is a privileged narrative body: interpreter of a history suspended between past and present, and gateway to a new search for meaning of those who inhabit those dark and painful territories, who remained buried in the silence of history. Therefore, from Carlo Levi’s travel memoirs we bring to the surface the idea of a forest so dense that it does not filter light, a space in which to experience the knowledge of others to better know oneself. An element that is therefore revealing and which converts into lucus a lucendo, or into a place for light to be, a place for light to be. (Alessandra Lancellotti)
