Country: Italy
Year: 2025
Duration: 21
A resurfaced audiocassette. An unreleased interview from the early 90s with an Italian refugee in Paris. Paris seen through the amateur footage of families on vacation and the authorial gaze of Armando Ceste, a master of militant cinema. A private story, old images that surface with difficulty, amidst disturbing fragments of walls and torn billboards of a contemporary Turin, tell us of the “torn existences” of the many who, lacking documents, today as in the past, live "out of place" in our cities.
Biography
film director
Claudio Paletto
(Turin, 1954) lives and works in his hometown. Since the 1980s, he has created around eighty works, including short films, documentaries, urban installations, performances, art exhibitions, and museum displays. Many of his films have been featured at international festivals — including the Torino Film Festival, Rotterdam, Bellaria, Filmmaker in Milan, Montbéliard, Lecce, and Casablanca — as well as in various showcases (Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Banja Luka, Genoa, Eindhoven, Tunis, New York) and markets (Clermont-Ferrand, Cannes). Several of his works have received awards (in 1985 and 1993 in the Spazio Aperto section of the Festival Cinema Giovani, in 1990 in Immagini di realtà at Filmmaker, and in 1995 at the European Script Fund in London) and have been broadcast on television (Rai 3 and La7 in Italy, Canal+ in France, Munich TV in Germany). From 2001 to 2013, he curated the independent film series Strane Visioni at the Amantes Cultural Club.
FILMOGRAFIA
Rock contro il nucleare (coll., doc,1983), Ripresi (coregia Mimmo Calopresti, cm, 1987), Bordi taglienti (mm.,1989), Alla fine del millennio (doc,1991) Massimo rispetto (doc,1993), Filo rosso (doc,1996), Zona 18, Limon – Guatemala (doc, 2000), Gocce di mercurio (cm, 2003), Bambini d’Italia (cm, 2004), Walls and Borders (coll., 2009), Piccola italiana (doc, 2010), Neighbours (coregia Maddalena Merlino, doc, 2014) Acqua passata (cm, 2019), Lo spirito continua (cm, 2019), Imperfetto presente, voci dal primo lockdown (coregia Maddalena Merlino, doc, 2020), Souvenir de Paris (cm, 2025).
Declaration
film director
“I chose to work with two very different types of archival materials. On one hand, the ordinary yet evocative family films brought back by Italians visiting Paris some forty years ago. On the other, the deeply engaged perspective captured by Armando Ceste in two of his films from the same period. I intervened on the footage not only through editing, but in a visually radical and authorial way. I believe this was the only way to update the material and convey the emotional ruptures inherent in a story that is both deeply personal and universally relevant. This is not a film about politics. It is a political film.”
Cast
& Credits
DIRECTOR, STORY, EDITING: Claudio Paletto. MUSIC: Roberto “Tax” Farano, Arrigo Tommasi. SOUND: Roberto “Tax” Farano. PHOTOGRAPHIES: Maddalena Merlino, Claudio Paletto. PRODUCTION: Claudio Paletto per Like a gym in a squat film. COPRODUCTIO: Associazione Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Archivio Armando Ceste, Home Movies - Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia.
CONTACT: Claudio Paletto claudio.paletto@gmail.com
