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Specifications
Colour / Black and white : Couleur
Lengh : 90 mn
Locations and shooting dates : Calabria, Ialia - October 2007 - 8 weeks - 35 mm
Shooting language : ITALIAN
Working budget : 600 000 €
Acquired financing : 110 000 €
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Statement
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The Four Times is a film about matter, ancestral substances that are brought to light in their most genuine condition against the background of a still-medieval village. They stand out in such a way as to become the film's own language, not because of their individual peculiarities but rather because of a common beauty that brings them together and merges one into the other.
The film's four substances form a succession, like four external shells of a single being that lives four times as human, animal, plant and mineral. The game is all about blurring their boundaries, drawing up shapes with increasingly imperceptible contours. This is what happens in each single episode, as well as in their mutual relationships. Each time all four substances are there, and the idea is to move them around, alternating them like in a dance, so that everything that is background is always on the verge of becoming foreground, conforming to the human element and blending straight into it. The spectator suddenly enters a danger zone, feels that the story touches him, invades him just as it invades the surrounding space and turns into a shining, cosmic dust that gets into the lungs and dwells in our bodies. It turns into pure spirit that becomes incarnate one fifth and final time, in ourselves.
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Synopsis
The Four Times works within the gulf between documentary and fiction, and can be understood in three different ways. It can be seen as a science fiction film without special effects, or as an ethnographic documentary on some parts of the Calabrian Appennine, or as an essay about the human soul.
The four episodes tell the stories of four "leading characters": an old shepherd in the last days of his life; the birth and first few weeks of a kid till its first pasturing under the olive trees; the life of an old chestnut tree in the course of the seasons; and the transformation of the old chestnut into charcoal through the work of the charcoal burners.
All four episodes are set on the Ionian side of the Calabrian peninsula and are intertwined with one another in such a way as to make up one single story: the story of one soul that goes through four successive lives.
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Contacts
| Production: INVISIBILE FILM - 37 via G. B. Morgagni - 20129 Milano - ITALIE - T : 39 02 295 31059 - [email protected]
Coproduction :
CARAVAN PASS, Viviana Andriani
363bis rue des pyrénées 75020 PARIS FRANCE -
T : 33 1 42 66 36 35 - [email protected] |
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