Country: Italy, Germany
Year: 2001
Duration: 70'
Flavia is a sixty-one-years-old beautician who has been working at this since she was eleven. She is in her beauty parlor in Padua at seven at night on its very last day open before closing forever. The shop is immersed in darkness. Flavia, who is about to retire, has remained alone. Her assistant Livia has already gone home. A dim light bulb lights Flavia's hands while she puts big and little scissors back in their places. Her hands are covered by strange cracks in her skin running parallel to her finger bones that have been blackened by hair dyes. Outside there is the heartbeat of the outskirts of a small Italian city - the women's soccer team, the private radio station, and a small circus.
"The video camera observes life while it is happening" (Alessandro Rossetto).
Biography
film director
Alessandro Rossetto
(Padua, 1963) is a film writer, director, cinematographer, and cameraman. He has made documentaries that are considered some of the most significant of his generation (including Bibione Bye Bye One, 1999, and Chiusura, 2001, presented in competition at the Torino Film Festival; and The Colony (Vacanze di guerra), 2012). He debuted in fiction films in 2013 with Piccola patria (Small Homeland), presented at the Venice Film Festival, as was his next movie, Effetto Domino (2019). In 2021, he made The Italian Banker. This is how his work has been described by critics: “His cinematographic eye is priceless, full of curiosity and sensitivity. In his movies, with a mise-en-scène of rigor and poetry, he lets us encounter touching situations and people, showing us their intimate imagination, their view of the world, and their extraordinary, everyday life.”
FILMOGRAFIA
Il fuoco di Napoli (1997), Bibione Bye Bye One (1999), Chiusura (2001), Nulla due volte (cm, 2005), Feltrinelli (doc, 2006), L'orchestra di Piazza Vittorio: I diari del ritorno (doc, 2007), The Colony (Vacanze di guerra) (doc, 2012), Piccola patria (2013), Effetto Domino (2019), The Italian Banker (2021).
Cast
& Credits
Regia, soggetto e sceneggiatura: Alessandro Rossetto.
Director of photography: Gianenrico Gogo Bianchi.
Sound: Marco Fiumara.
Editor: Jacopo Quadri.
Production company and Italian distribution: Carlo Cresto-Dina e Alessandro Rossetto per Fandango, via Ajaccio 20, 00198 Roma, Italia, tel. +39-06-85354026, fax +39-06-85353790, www.fandango.it, e-mail fandango@fandango.it.
Co-production: Zdf-Arte, Tele+, Yle Tv2, Millenium Production Helsinki, Bbc.
Foreign sales agent: First Hand Film, Schaffhauserstrasse 359, 8050 Zürich, Switzerland, tel. +41-1-3122060.
Director of photography: Gianenrico Gogo Bianchi.
Sound: Marco Fiumara.
Editor: Jacopo Quadri.
Production company and Italian distribution: Carlo Cresto-Dina e Alessandro Rossetto per Fandango, via Ajaccio 20, 00198 Roma, Italia, tel. +39-06-85354026, fax +39-06-85353790, www.fandango.it, e-mail fandango@fandango.it.
Co-production: Zdf-Arte, Tele+, Yle Tv2, Millenium Production Helsinki, Bbc.
Foreign sales agent: First Hand Film, Schaffhauserstrasse 359, 8050 Zürich, Switzerland, tel. +41-1-3122060.