A long dark figure moves among the ruins of a city that has vanished A man studies Russian, his home filled with unopened boxes Another man talks with his father, he loves him but rejects him An enigmatic young woman leads a revolt The Buddhist Mayor prays in his room A white horse gallops among abandoned houses A band plays in front of a cemetery Another human being is about to be born Cruise ships are white boxes and Messina, after so many catastrophes, tries to resurface.
Trailer
Clips
Synopsis
Among the fragments of a city rebuilt on the ruins of a disaster, in the echo of a catastrophe that has never entirely subsided, Upwelling, is a wave that comes from the bottom of the sea and brings the deep waters to the surface. A whole party of characters keeps appearing throughout the film, moving like satellites around a living and unexpected universe: they represent the attempts to resist against and revitalize the historical traditions of a deteriorated and static city.
We are in Messina, a city that has been totally rebuilt after one of the most devastating natural disasters in the twentieth century. This is where we have been living for two years, trying to establish a deep intimacy with the people who would later become the characters in this film. In Upwelling, there is constant search for a connection between the concept of catastrophe and the notion of ascending.
Director’s statement
The desire to find a relationship between the film we had in mind and current-day Messina led us to spend many months in the city without shooting a single frame. We needed time to better and fully understand the people who would later become the characters in our film and to establish an intimate connection with them. The conviction with which we shared and nurtured this desire brought us to live in Messina for two years.
Every single thing seemed like an endless number of things: the Pinelli Theater and its attempt at urban revitalization and its itinerant, unpredictable occupations; Pietro who refuses anything institutional and teaches at the University where he maintains he brings punk, disorder; Max, who wanders like a stranger around the city he was born in; Renato, the Mayor, who poses spiritual objectives to himself for his community; Giulia and her political commitment and nonconformist pregnancy; the invisible echo of a city that has vanished, the dead that establish themselves within the living through the ruins of an ancient cemetery and the position of this city in the Mediterranean, along with mythological implications that narrate the life of the Strait.
Every single thing seemed to be intimately connected. All these distinct and separate elements became part of a multitude as vast as it is contained, in the need to achieve an account of a journey within a unique city. This film contains elements tied to the idea of a traditional narrative, but the narrative is often put into difficulty by its elliptical way of proceeding and by the desire to, as Italo Calvino suggests, “lose the thread a hundred times in order to find yourself again after a hundred twists and turns”.
He received his degree in Documentary Film Direction from the Accademia del cinema e della televisione di Roma a Cinecittà (The Rome Academy of Film and Television at Cinecittà). He took the Masters class in Filmmaker, The Documentary as a View, in Venice. He directed his first documentary Roma Residence that was in competition at the Torino Film Festival in 2007 and numerous other film festivals. He develops audiovisual current event material for film foundations. His second documentary, Il Vangelo secondo Maria is about an aristocratic Rom family that becomes sedentary and Evangelist. It was presented at the Torino Film Festival in 2009 and received the status of art film by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage. Recently, he has been working on a road movie on the act of creation around the world by masters of pottery that is currently being edited.
Silvia Jop
She received her degree in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at the University of Siena with a thesis on European Ethnology on the Right to Asylum in Italy. She is the Editorial Coordinator of the blog, lavoroculturale.org. She conceived and edits, Com’è bella l’imprudenza, a book dedicated to brief autobiographies of theaters in Italy occupied by squatters and the project #imprudenze2013: an itinerant study that takes place in occupied theaters along the entire peninsula during the Spring of 2013. Currently she is Social Media Manager at the Fondazione lettera27 and is involved in the development of the project Cosa Pensano Le Ragazze, produced by Dora Maar in collaboration with Repubblica.it.
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