Florence 13rd - 20th November 2010

International documentary film festival

  • BALIFILM

    Canada 1997 28'
    Directed by: Peter Mettler
    The shootings took place between 1990 and 1992, but Mettler also employed unused film stock and several film leaders. The footage was reversed in video and later retransformed in film. Mettler’s gaze wanders in search of elements and epiphanies, reminding Stan Brakhage’s practice in some way. What really matters to him is restore the unity of a place by means of faces, gestures, sounds, and images.

    2010 Thursday 18th November, Spazio Uno, 3:00 pm

  • EASTERN AVENUE

    Canada 1985 55'
    Directed by: Peter Mettler
    “In the spring of 1983 I made a journey across my insight which led me throughout Switzerland, Berlin, and Portugal. The pictures are essentially my response to the people and the sites I’ve seen. They are edited together following the same method based on impulse. The sound was edited according to this principle as well.” A real visual jam session made in three months.

    2010 Monday 15th November, Spazio Uno, 5:30 pm

  • GAMBLING, GODS AND LSD

    Switzerland/Canada 2002 180'
    Directed by: Peter Mettler
    This film literally came to light adventurously and more than 50 hours of footage span across extremely different territories such as Switzerland and India, Canada and the US. From Albert Hoffman, the scientist who invented LSD, to the owner of a fetish sex shop, passing through Las Vegas and then India, Mettler offers multiple levels of reality. “Many things simply happen as a matter of fact – haphazardly. That’s what I like: everything happens too quickly for the rational part of your brain to be able to fully account for it.”

    2010 Friday 19th November, Spazio Uno, 9:00 pm

  • GREGORY

    Canada 1981 27'
    Directed by: Peter Mettler
    A man and a woman are woken up in the middle of the night. The woman is prey of her nightmares. Both are haunted by their own ghosts. She cannot make sense of her mind’s intangibility, whereas her body is perceived as weighty and clumsy. The man tells her a story that has been tormenting him since he was a child. When his parents forbade him to go and play with his little friends, he would let his mind leave his body and escape his family’s impositions.

    2010 Monday 15th November, Spazio Uno, 5:30 pm

  • LANCALOT FREELY

    Canada 1980 22'
    Directed by: Peter Mettler
    A short made when its author still was at film school. A powerful and impassioned portrait of his friend Kevin Jamieson, whom he had lost touch with since adolescence. He met him again six years later, and found him totally changed. Kevin, a.k.a. Lancalot, has become a pusher who lives at the margins of society even though – or because – he is from bourgeois origins.

    2010 Monday 15th November, Spazio Uno, 5:30 pm

  • PETROPOLIS
    Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands

    Canada 2009 40'
    Directed by: Peter Mettler
    Mostly shot from a chopper, Petropolis offers a unique perspective on the vastest bitumen mining system in the world. The environmental impact of this system is frightening: a tar deposit as big as England is flown over amidst images and hypnotic sounds. A striking and disturbing journey in a dehumanized world, subdued to the supreme power of oil.

    2010 The film will be shown (in loop) inside the photo exhibition from Sunday 14th November to Saturday 20th November at the

  • PICTURE OF LIGHT

    Canada 1994 83'
    Directed by: Peter Mettler
    "Picture of Light" is an attempt to record the colours and the imagery created by the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis). Along with friend Andreas Züst, Mettler’s Swiss supporter, he embarked on a 3,000 miles journey on a train to go to Churchill, Manitoba, on the shore of the Bay of Hudson and far away from the civilised world. To record the colours of Aurora Borealis three frames per minute were exposed, and later blown up artificially in the printing phase.

    2010 Sunday 14th November, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • SCISSERE

    Canada 1982 83'
    Directed by: Peter Mettler
    A drug addict, a young mother and an entomologist overlap their lives’ journeys unaware. Peter Mettler took his inspiration for this film from Bruno Scissere, a heroin addict affected by psychic problems he met when he was serving at a rehabilitation clinic in Münsterlingen, Switzerland. “I was deeply charmed by his way of being. Nonetheless, the film is not a portrait of Bruno, but emulates his way of being.”

    2010 Thursday 18th November, Spazio Uno, 3:00 pm

  • TECTONIC PLATES

    Canada 1990 106'
    Directed by: Peter Mettler
    Painter Madeleine is in love with her art history instructor Jacques. She doesn’t know that so is deaf-mute librarian Antoine. When Jacques disappears and leaves no trace behind, Madeleine goes to Venice aiming to commit suicide. There she meets Constance, a drug addict whom she bonds with.

    2010 Tuesday 16th November, Spazio Uno, 5:00 pm

  • THE TOP OF HIS HEAD

    Canada 1989 110'
    Directed by: Peter Mettler
    Gus Victor is a seller of satellite dishes. His life is deeply shaken when he haphazardly meets performance artist Lucy, whose strategy consists in involving unaware people in her performances of aesthetic terrorism. “To make this film was a big lesson. You think you can count on all that money and you can do everything. Reality proved to be the opposite. Money was a limitation.”

    2010 Wednesday 17th November, Spazio Uno, 5:00 pm

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