Lab 80 film

Franco Piavoli is one of the most important directors among Italian independent panorama. Through the years, He built one unique and authentic cinematographic grammar. Born in 1933, He spent his whole life in Pozzolengo, a small village near Garda’s lake. There, He imagined, wrote and - for the most part - shot his own works. We visited him in his house, with us only two reels in super 8mm, and asked him to tell us about his next movie.

The story of Atalanta's Curva Nord from 1993 to the present day through the eyes of Claudio "Bocia" Galimberti, one of the most charismatic figures among the Bergamaschi ultras. The movie retraces the past thirty years of his life, closely intertwined with the events of the Curva and the ultras world in general, which has been undergoing a frantic and profound evolution.

This documentary film is a portrait of a film critic as seen by a filmmaker. While contemporary cinema manipulates reality by hiding itself, this experiment manifests the opposite in an explicit and evident way. The film critic has been asked to travel to the city of Bergamo to participate in a 70-minute film experiment: savoring 2 kg of oysters and drinking 2 bottles of wine, while simultaneously answering 15 general knowledge questions and 15 solicitations of a private and personal nature. The outcome is a ruinous game in which the meaning of filming and the fragility of a human being merge into a melancholic testament.

Art documentary about the Accademia Carrara gallery, which reopened in 2015 after seven years of extensive restoration.

A documentary film about the independent band UZEDA who brought a disruptive sound from Sicily to almost everywhere.

Marco Belelli, aka Divino Otelma, is a well-known Italian philosopher and television personality. He has 6 degrees and owes his notoriety to his past career as a magician, chansonnier, politician. He is also the founder of the Theurgical Order of Elios and the Church of the Living, a cult with more than 20,000 followers, in which he has the role of a self-proclaimed God. Obstructed in the first stages of its production by the Covid-19 pandemic, the film unfolds over one long year of exchanges at distance between the director and the “Divine”, through Skype conversations in which the manifold topics relating to his multifaceted existence are treated. Significant figures who have been variously connected with his earthly life are also involved in this long journey of knowledge, contributing with their precious testimonies and blurring further our understanding of such a complex and layered figure.

For eight years, Ferdinando has stopped speaking with people. In the solitude of his Milan apartment, he cooks, practices singing, and does an improbable form of gymnastics. He is paid to keep company to Genziana, a wealthy and cultured lady, who needs to connect with a deep soul akin to her own. Ferdinando reads her passages of literature. She narrates the happy fragments of her life, now vanished: she is a widow, her children are far away, the house is empty and silent. In his free time, Ferdinando visits modernist architecture and spiritual places. His isolation is interrupted by calls from Domenico, an eccentric who rambles about lofty subjects, aware that he cannot break his friend's mutism.

Bianca is a trans sex worker, whose life and work play out in her Milan flat. The camera follows her into her tiny realm: phone calls with clients, philosophy, sex and cigarettes, sing-songs with friends, conversations with her faraway girlfriend.

A collective archive film, made with the contribution of unpublished images from some of the main archives of different territorial origins, between Lazio, Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy and Emilia Romagna. A journey through time and space: through small cameras, partisans, soldiers, priests and "ordinary citizens" felt the need to document for future memory - and, in some cases, at their own risk - History "as it happens", but also the long waits and daily life that intersect with the events of the two-year period 1943-45. And then the Liberation: the arrival of the Allies, the joy, the dances and finally it's time to get married.

Between 1946 and 1951, "The Sardinian Project" upsets the history of Sardinia: the definitive disappearance of malaria, an endemic disease in many areas of the island. However, the disinfestation of the island represents only the first station of a stratified journey, a path between different eras, registers and points of view: the propaganda images and war-like symbols intersect with the gaze of the film-amateurs.

Against the backdrop of Italy in the years of the Fascist dictatorship, a man of wealth but unknown to history scrutinises the world with his little film camera. He is guided and instructed in the process by a handbook in which the germs of the ideology are concealed beneath the apparent objectivity of technique. But ineffable signs of resistance still surface in the images.

A sculptor needs a thick garden. During the day he makes funeral casts to the dead of the village, giving their respective families not the authentic remains but a wax copy covered by a death mask. The corpses, carefully placed in the ground behind the house, make the garden mature, while the colonies of mushrooms fueled by their decomposition generate unexpected visions in those who walk there.

A man, inside his kitchen, is preparing his packed lunch. He has decided to visit the Brion Tomb, a monumental funeral complex designed and built by the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa. It was commissioned by Onorina Brion Tomasin to honour the memory of her deceased and beloved relative Giuseppe Brion, founder and owner of the Brionvega company and is located in the small cemetery of San Vito in the hamlet of Altivole in the province of Treviso.

This documentary is the result of a series of visits the filmmaker makes over the course of a year to the house of Pierino, a cinephile and a fascinatingly organized man.