Alessandro Quaranta
2007.
Italy.
vo Italian.
s English.
9’
Those mountains that hinder me to see.
The video already in the title entangles the matter of seeing between reality, memory and imaginary. The words that we listen to, come from an elder woman who tells an event of her youth as a migrant departing from the Piedmont Alps in Italy to ‘serve’ in a family in the French Provence.
The story focuses on a brief moment of the 2nd World War when, just before the declaration of war on France, the woman gets a letter that announces her mother's illness. The borders with Italy are closed, and it will be a game of relays that will make possible the delivery of words from hand to hand, creating a communication bridge on both sides of the mountains.
Based on this logic, I decided to 'entrust' the visual translation to another author, a filmmaker, inviting him to remake that trip to France and freely film the places mentioned or evoked. In this case, too, the protagonist is not seen, except for a brief appearance at the end, and it is the sound of her voice, in the hybrid language of the borderlands, that creates the narrative rhythm and gives the story its emotional temperature.
https://vimeo.com/quarantaalessandro
