40° TORINO FILM FESTIVAL
ITALIAN DOCUMENTARIES COMPETITION
CINQUE UOMINI, UN DIARIO AL DI LÀ DELLA SCENA
by Cosimo Terlizzi
Country: Switzerland, Italy
Year: 2022
Duration: 62'
In 2008, Antonio used an amateur movie camera to film his colleagues in the dressing rooms of the show in which he was performing. For over ten years, the cassettes lay forgotten, before becoming this movie. The material he shot instinctively proved to be a touching diary without filters, in which Antonio revealed the vulnerability, doubts, joys, and difficulties of the acting profession. The dressing rooms seem like the other side of the stage: an intimate, secret, transient place, where actors can set their masks down on the table for a while.
Biography
film director
Cosimo Terlizzi
(Bitonto, Bari, Italy, 1973) is a visual artist living and working in Apulia, who experiments with photograph, performance, installations, video. His works have been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), MamBo (Bologna), the Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw), the Fondazione Merz (Turin), MACRO (Rome), the National Museum of Wrocław (Poland). His documentaries have been presented in Rotterdam, at the Dance Biennale in Venice, the Torino Film Festival, the Festival internacional de cine in Mar del Plata, the London Documentary Festival. In 2018, with Buena Onda (the production company of Valeria Golino, Riccardo Scamarcio, and Viola Prestieri), he made his first feature fiction film, Dei. In 2019 presented at the TFF his film Dentro di te c’è la terra. He’s the artistic director of the Asolo Art Film Festival.
FILMOGRAFIA
Aiuto! Orde barbare al pratello (doc., 1996-2011), Nadia Luca & Roberto (cm, 1997), Ritratto di famiglia (cm, 2001), Rocca Petrosa (cm, 2002), Une saison en enfer (cm, 2004), Murgia (doc., 2008), Fratelli Fava (cm, 2008), S.N. (cm, 2008), Folder (doc., 2010), L’uomo doppio (doc., 2012), La benedizione degli animali (cm, 2013), Aurora, un percorso di creazione (doc., 2015), Dei (2018), Dentro di te c’è la terra (doc., 2019), Cinque Uomini, un diario al di là della scena (doc., 2022).
Declaration
film director
“The director of the Compagnie du Passage, Robert Bouvier, invited me to take a look at the dozens of MiniDv cassettes containing the video documentation of the tour of the show Cinq hommes, that took place in 2008. I was very intrigued by the fact that the actor had filmed his own colleagues in the dressing rooms. The first time I looked at the material, which was low quality and with poor audio, I couldn't figure out the right way to render interesting that mountain of apparently directionless shot film. I was moved by the death of one of the actors, Boubacar, and I took another look at the filmed material with different eyes. I tried to stop considering that material like an amateur film and instead to give those hours of shots a value. From that moment, the meaning of that shot film came into focus and everything happened as though I were searching for the pieces scattered throughout those tapes. The result is a revealing and touching movie about the world of actors.”
Cast
& Credits
DIRECTOR, SCREENPLAY, FILM EDITING: Cosimo Terlizzi. MUSIC: Agostino Nestola. SOUND: CAST: Antonio Buil, Dorin Dragos, Abder Ouldhaddi, Boubacar Samb, Bartek Sozanski. PRODUCTION: Compagnie du Passage, Lamia Santolina.
CONTACT:
Cosimo Terlizzi cosimo.terlizzi@gmail.com
