Synopsis

A short film born from a participatory experience in the territory of Ponte San Giovanni, in the suburbs of Perugia, which weaves a plot made out of fragments from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Calderòn and Bestia da stile along with the visions that the poetic practice in the urban landscape has generated.

A journey that begins in a bourgeois environment, in which people live as figures crystallized in their roles and in the stories they make of themselves.

Among these figures, young people are detached from the narrative in which they are confined and are moving towards new ways of manifesting themselves in the world.

They invoke, with that rebellious act, the gaze of the poet Pasolini, while trying to become splinters of his light. They embody his tongue and appear as icons to guard the places crossed.

Director’s statement

I’ve been asked by the University of Perugia to create an event that could celebrate Pasolini’s birth centenary and that could involve all the students who took part in the Theater Lab. 

I’ve always felt a strong emotional connection with Pier Paolo Pasolini, with his poetical and social rebellion, that he has always embodied authentically. That’s the main reason why I have embraced this proposal with both a strong sense of gratitude and an almost mystic intent. My intent was to try and evoke his spirit in me, while celebrating him in each person and place I would have encountered in the meantime. I’ve tried to build an experience that could have brought him back to life, that could have materialized his words and his meanings. 

We moved to the suburbs so that we could encounter this experience in his communities, in his geography. We moved to the suburbs so that we could free the final result from the responsibility of containing traces of Pasolini’s spirit. And we did so, because we knew the process to reach this final stage would have been authentic enough to be considered a gift. 

There have been five missions to explore some spots in Ponte San Giovanni. Each mission has involved all those who wanted to be part of it. Artistic and social opinions scattered in various texts, films and interviews were our compass. I’ve tried to imagine how to translate each of them into an experience through theatrical practices.

During each encounter emerged multiple narrative traces and iconographic figures, which evoked, in a certain way, the poetic soul that encounters the urban contemporary world, symbol of strong social contradictions.

The selection of the texts came out naturally. However, I’ve chosen the theater, as this was the last linguistic form he approached during his last years, right after witnessing the end of all those sincere languages that inhabited Italy before the rise of television.

Bestia da Stile is his most autobiographical piece. On one side, in Jan’s words one may encounter his life-long feelings and thoughts. On the other side, Calderon lets emerge the social critique and the way in which the bourgeois societies’ sight forces individuals free souls to predetermined roles, forges by places and membership.

I really wanted to transform some of our contemporary and painful visions through the poet’s free sight and to make them relive even into the abandoned concrete.

While performing in professional theater I felt a sense of marginalization from a wider realm of humanity, and realized I needed to make my artistic exploration more participatory, to open more significant connections between people and art, while trying to not minimize its research.

A path to that quest for me is to bring the artistic language and lenses in those contexts that seem to be strangers to it. Not to bend the artistic possibilities and use art as an activity that either heals or educates, but to stretch peoples’ languages to the exploration of its mystery.

I feel a rawness in non professional actors that evoke a sincere and essential beauty, which matches the aesthetics with the meanings I try to develop. I wish to blend the traces of theatrical performance into the language of film, or to explore that possibility, to play with essential symbols or poetic evocative sets or gestures and the extreme realism of ordinary life and time.