Country: France, Italy
Year: 2026
Duration: 110'
In 2017, in Kyiv, Augusto Contento meets an elderly woman who, before she dies, tells him her life story – even though she hides many secrets. Who was Neva? Raised in western Ukraine, young, educated, a communist, and an idealist, she moved to Kyiv, where she taught Italian literature at the university and fell in love. Then something snapped. During a dinner, Neva utters words that were forbidden under Stalin, and shortly thereafter everything comes crashing down: interrogations, betrayals, the penal colony in Siberia. Even after she leaves the USSR, Neva is haunted by memories: places, names, and identities change, but not her memory. A single protagonist runs through her memory, alternately becoming Neva, the men she loved, her tormentors, and her victims. Her appearances are interwoven with testimonies from Russian writer Mikhail Shishkin and political scientist Nina Khrushcheva, while the animation brings to the surface what no archive can reveal: the realm of the unconscious.
Biography
film director
Augusto Contento
Augusto Contento (Lanciano, Chieti, Italy, 1973) made his first documentary, Onibus, in Brazil in 2007, winning several awards including best documentary at the Bellaria Film Festival and Sulmonacinema Film Festival. This first documentary of his is part of a tetralogy on Brazil that also includes Tramas and Transparent Roads, both presented to Locarno in 2008. The next year he made Roads of Water with UNESCO's international patronage, shooting in Brasil's Amazon forest, and presented to many film festivals including the Rencontres internationaux eau et cinéma in Marseille, the Festival Brésil en mouvement in Paris, and the International Rome Film Festival.
FILMOGRAFIA
Onibus (mm, doc., 2007), Tramas (doc., 2008), Strade trasparenti (doc., 2008), Strade d’acqua (doc., 2009), Journal de bord d’un bateau fantôme (doc., 2012), Rosso Cenere (mm, doc., 2012), Parallax Sounds (doc., 2012).
Declaration
film director
“The film is a journey into memory and the depths of the human soul – a journey through the lives of people who have shared an indelible and harrowing past to which they will remain bound forever. A white space where unspeakable truths accumulated endlessly; where thousands of innocents were imprisoned in the gulags and condemned to a fate as ghosts: a journey into the horror of the Russian gulags.”
Cast
& Credits
DIRECTOR, SCREENPLAY, CINEMATOGRAPHY, EDITING: Augusto Contento. ANIMATION: Marco Belli, Veronica Cardillo, Giulia Canova. MUSIC: Paolo Cantù. SOUND: Paolo Cantù, Jacopo Bonora. CAST: Marta Cortellazzo Wiel, Teresa Fallai, Nina Khruscheva, Mikhail Shishkin. PRODUCTION: Giancarlo Grande for Cineparallax, Rino Sciarretta for Zivago Film. CO-PRODUCTION: Rai Cinema, Cinecittà - Istituto Luce. CONTACT: giancarlo@cineparallax.com.
