Final group photo with the organizers. Director Michele Sammarco is the first on the right (photo: Antonio Smaniotto)
Forget Hollywood: I’m talking about young cinema, emerging artistic generations, new camera talents who, thanks also to initiatives like this, make themselves known to the public.
L’overture di Veneto Barbaro 2022 took place on Friday 24 June at the Sala Cinema-Teatro Valbrenta in Solagna, a place for cineforums and cinephiles, a small gem with a large screen that remained closed for too long due to the pandemic show events being blocked. Free entry, an installation at the entrance made with waste recovered on the banks of the Brenta (and then you will understand why) and above all many young people sitting in the stalls.
A piece of the future agreed in the room that emanated a fresh air of vitality, like the wind that blows in the Valley.
The audience is largely young, the organizers are young and the protagonist of the evening is also young: Michele Sammarco, director from Padua, who graduated from the triennial of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Venice and then at the Direction of the Civic School of Cinema ” Luchino Visconti ”in Milan. All together passionately to attend the screening of his work before him: The inner worlda 40-minute short film set in the Euganean Hills that tells the ancient custom, suspended between a deep-rooted religious faith and a solid peasant superstition, of entrusting the healing of animals to Sant’Antonio Abate.
In introducing the participated meeting, the mayor of Solagna Stefano Bertoncello thanked the young people of Veneto Barbaro for their commitment “to promote culture in the Valley and beyond” and with regard to small towns, such as the one that hosted the screening, he underlined that “today they represent a breath of fresh air for the quality of life”.
Leonardo Scapin, one of the frontmen of the organizing committee, before introducing the director revealed to those present the added value of the appointment: the presence in the room of the members, also very young, of Running Ecology.
As explained by themselves on the microphone, it is a group of girls and boys with a passion for plogging: a new term of Swedish origin from the vocabulary of our new times hungry for environmental sustainability, which indicates the practice of collecting the waste that you encounter while jogging or another outdoor sport activity. Starting with their adventure in November 2020, the young people of Running Ecology have already put themselves to work several times to clean up the banks of the Brenta in Bassano, Cartigliano or Fontaniva from garbage, but also our Adriatic beaches. Sacks and bags of waste collected by the exponents of a generation that, as explained by the runners of the environment, suffers from “eco anxiety” for the future of the planet. And with some of the waste torn from the nature of the river and blocked in their path that leads to the sea – cans, shoes, bottles and so on – the installation at the entrance to the cinema was created: a sort of Arc de Triomphe of what was once called civic education and which today should instead be called collective awareness.
The inner mountainthe short film by Michele Sammarco to see which the opening event of Veneto Barbaro was conceived, narrates the deep friendship between an elderly farmer who lives alone on his farm in the Paduan countryside and his sick donkey named Giorgio.
The narrative pretext that develops the story of the film is the refusal of the village priest to the request to give his blessing to the “musso”, branding it as a “belief of other times”.
But the old perpetual of the parish priest secretly gives the farmer a package of salt so that he can take it to the sanctuary of Sant’Antonio Abate to ask the patron saint for his intercession and then have the donkey drink the water with blessed salt to make him heal. .
The result is a story in images – with very few dialogues and zero music, except for the car radio on while the farmer moves by car towards the mountain of the sanctuary – with deliberately slow rhythms, suitable for representing the rituality of gestures, the strength of symbols and the primordial spirituality of this man devoted to God and devoted to his donkey.
The real soundtrack de The inner mountain is the direct sound: of the clouds that bring the rain, of the musso that kicks in the stable, of the car engine that starts, of a flock of sheep (crossed by chance and inserted in the film) that blocks the car, of the spring water collected in bottles to make you dissolve the blessed salt.
The sound, rendered with the Dolby Surround 7.1 system, is indeed the fundamental element of the work.
“It’s a film made up of soundscapes – Sammarco later confirmed speaking to the audience -. I want to give the sound the same space as the images, in an equal relationship. ”
The first rural and then mountain environment in which the story takes place is represented in the short with extreme realism, but the poetic and eventually dreamlike vein of the story – which progressively takes on fairy tale contours, generates the sensation of an open ending and stimulates interesting questions – it clearly differentiates it from the docufilm.
A tribute to a small ancient world, light years away from the director’s generation yet recalled with surprising effectiveness.
Shot in 2019, in the last breaths of the pre Covid era, The inner mountain it landed in 2020 at the international competition “Visions du Réel” in Nyon in Switzerland and at the historic cinema event of the real “Laceno d’oro” in Avellino, and yet subjected to the not very exciting pandemic modality of remote participation.
Now that you can go to the cinema again, Sammarco continues to take him around, accompanied by some members of the crew, all of his companions from the other specializations (such as photography, sound or editing) of the Civic School of Cinema “Luchino Visconti” in Milan, who took a week off to participate in the shoot. And in a film of many sounds but few words, the real protagonist can only be mute, braying aside: the donkey Giorgio, normally used in the activities of pet therapy and therefore used to interacting with humans, which did not take long to empathize with the camera as well. “You work – explained the director – with a creature who is sincere.”
From this sentence we could broaden the focus on the concept of sincerity applied to human beings instead, but – and I am sincere – it is better to leave it alone.
The grand finale of the first evening of Veneto Barbaro at the legendary Valbrenta cinema in Solagna was dedicated to the inevitable group photo-memories – complete with the official t-shirt of the review – of the organizers first with the girls of the Running Ecology group and then with the young Paduan director . Other than barbarians: it is the Sammarco battalion.