Country: Italy
Year: 1998
Duration: 52'
Nico Cirasola is an independent director from southern Italy who is unknown to audiences in his own country. He had never managed to have one of his films entered into competition at the Venice Film Festival. In 1997 the only Italian critic to have appreciated his work become one of the people on the board selecting the films for the Festival. For this reason, Nico Cirosola decided to shoot a film so that he would not miss this opportunity. He only had three months to create, shoot, and edit his third feature film.
"I have been able to build a sort of monumental film biography about an unknown director using sequences from his previous films, listening to the chorus-like story-telling about his adventures narrated by some of the many people he had to do with, and, naturally, conveying the most emblematic moments from his making of his latest film, Bassa Marea. He is a tireless dissipater of those precious sources of energy that he manages to gather around himself. He is in love with an almost primordial idea of cinema. He is a slob, but has an unmistakable style. Nico Cirasola is a hero for our times, or maybe - to put it more simply - an average Italian" (G. Piperno).
Biography
film director
Giovanni Piperno
(Rome, 1964) worked as a photographer and assistant cameraman in movies and commercials; in 1997, he began making TV programs and documentaries. His films include L’esplosione, which won the Doc competition at the 2003 TFF and was nominated for a David di Donatello; This Is My Sister, which won the Avanti! award at the 2006 TFF; and Cimap! Centoitalianimattiapechino, which was presented at Locarno and won the 2009 Libero Bizzarri award. Il pezzo mancante (2010), about the Agnelli family, won the Cinema Doc competition at the TFF, while his next movie Le cose belle (2012), co-directed with Agostino Ferrente, participated at the Venice Film Festival and later won twenty-five national and international awards. The collective film 9x10 novanta (2014), produced by the Istituto Luce for its ninetieth anniversary, participated at the Giornate degli Autori in Venice and that same year he collaborated with Antonietta De Lillo on the documentary Let’s Go, out-of-competition at the 2014 TFF. In 2015, he presented the short films Se avessi le parole and Quasi eroi at the Rome Film Fest; this latter movie also won the Silver Ribbon for best short film. In 2017, he made the video installation L’energia degli italiani for the Italian pavilion at the Expo in Astana, Kazakhstan, and in 2018, the web series Ogni santo 23. In 2020, he presented the short Come si scrive ti amo in coreano in Rome and that same year he taught documentary directing at the Gian Maria Volonté Film School. In 2021 he presented Cipria.
FILMOGRAFIA
Ebrei in Sudafrica (coregia Laura Muscardin, cm, doc, 1992), Black Taxi (coregia Laura Muscardin, cm, 1993), Mosè a Bombay (coregia Laura Muscardin, cm, doc, 1994), Bananine unipolari (cm, doc, 1997), Il mio nome è Nico Cirasola (mm, doc, 1998), Intervista a mia madre (coregia Agostino Ferrente, mm, doc, 1999), Verdi Suprême (cm, doc, 2002), L’esplosione (doc, 2003), This Is My Sister (mm, doc, 2006), Cimap! Centoitalianimattiapechino (doc, 2008), La danza delle api (coregia Giulio Cederna, mm, doc), Il pezzo mancante (doc, 2010), Le cose belle (coregia Agostino Ferrente, doc, 2012), Miracolo italiano (ep. di 9x10 novanta, 2014), Chiedi a papà (serie tv, doc, 2015), Almost Heroes (cm, 2015), Viale Giorgio Morandi (2017), Lamiya (cm, 2019), Voci a domicilio (cm, 2019), Come si scrive ti amo in coreano (cm, 2019), Cipria (2021), Sedici millimetri alla rivoluzione (doc, 2023).
Cast
& Credits
Regia, soggetto e fotografia: Giovanni Piperno.
Sound: Brice Emiel, Massimiliano De Santis.
Music: Alessandro Murzi.
Editor: Ilaria Fraioli, Roberto Grassi.
Production company: Pixel, via Giovanni Antonelli 49, 00197 Roma, Italy, tel. +39-6-8083893, fax +39-6-8083300.
Sound: Brice Emiel, Massimiliano De Santis.
Music: Alessandro Murzi.
Editor: Ilaria Fraioli, Roberto Grassi.
Production company: Pixel, via Giovanni Antonelli 49, 00197 Roma, Italy, tel. +39-6-8083893, fax +39-6-8083300.