Country: Italy
Year: 1991
Duration: 117'
New York, October 1931. Two months after the death of trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke, his brother Burnie arrives in town. He wants to meet Lisa, the girl his brother claimed to be about to marry. However, research is not simple. Burnie knows Joe Venuti and the latter, Bix's only true friend, offers to help him. Traced Lisa, he convinces her to follow him in the birthplace of the musician. During the long journey, Joe discovers that Lisa has never really known Bix. Thus began the narration of the extraordinary stages of the life of the trumpet player. A story within America of the myth, that of the 1920s of prohibition and the birth of jazz.
Biography
film director
Pupi Avati
Pupi Avati (Bologna, Italy, 1938), after his debut as a musician with the Doctor Dixie Jazz Band, started a career as a sales representative, then approached the cinema, debuting in 1968 with Blood Relations. At home with genre cinema, he devoted himself to horror by creating works of worship such as The House with Laughing Windows (1976) and Zeder (1982). But it is with the narration of intimate stories often linked to the dimension of memory and the province that defines its own complete and personal poetics, found in films like A School Outing (1983), The Story of Boys & Girls (1989) and Incantato (2003), for which he obtained the David di Donatello as Best Director.
FILMOGRAFIA
Thomas e gli indemoniati (1969), La mazurka del barone, della santa e del fico fiorone (1974), Bordella (1975), Le strelle nel fosso (1978), Aiutami a sognare (1980), Dancing Paradise (1981), Regalo di Natale (1986), Fratelli e sorelle (1991), L’arcano incantatore (1996), Il testimone dello sposo (1998), I cavalieri che fecero l’impresa (2001), Il papà di Giovanna (2008), Un ragazzo d’oro (2014).
Declaration
film director
“It was only when I had reached the end of the research which I began somewhere in my teens, but which I have been working on in depth over the past four years, that I realized that the mass of documents we had collected on the life of Bix Beiderbecke was enormous. It was enough to discourage me and everyone else who had worked on it. What could be done to get all this material into just one film?”
Cast
& Credits
regia/director
Pupi Avati
soggetto, sceneggiatura/story, screenplay
Pupi Avati, Antonio Avati, Lino Patruno
fotografia/cinematography
Pasquale Rachini
montaggio/film editing
Amedeo Salfa
scenografia/production design
Carlo Simi
costumi/costume design
Graziella Virgili, Carla Seinera Bertoni
arrangiamenti/arrangement
Bob Wilber
suono/sound
Chat Gunter, Raffaele De Luca
interpreti e personaggi/cast and characters
Bryant Weeks (Bix), Mark Collver (Burnie), Marie-Louise (Barbara Wilder), Emile Levisetti (Joe Venuti), Sally Groth (Lisa)
produttore/producer
Antonio Avati
produzione/production
Duea Film, Union P.N., Rai Uno
**
contatti/contacts
Cineteca Nazionale
diffusioneculturale@fondazionecsc.it
http://www.fondazionecsc.it
