ZaLab Film

A study of the friendship between a Chinese woman and a fisherman who came to Italy from Yugoslavia many years ago, who live in a small city-island in the Veneto lagoon.

Stuck in his hometown, Venice, during the pandemic, director Andrea Segre turns the camera on the frozen city, while reminiscing about his father, a scientist and chemist, and the past.

Ibi photographed and filmed her life in Italy for 10 years. This film is the result of her images, her creativity, and her energy. For the first time in Europe, a film based entirely on the direct and spontaneous self-narrative of a migrant woman, who tells her children in Africa about herself and her Europe. An intense and intimate journey into the difficult, lively, and colorful world of a still unknown visual artist.

Brescia, March 2020. The Spedali Civili, the city's public hospital, suddenly finds itself inundated with patients. In the best tradition of direct cinema, Michele Aiello manages to document a moving slice of life, and to film, at the worst moments of this collective tragedy, the unprecedented reports that unite patients and health personnel in the face of the unknown.

Maryam is an involuntary immigrant in the US, who after forty years has not forgotten her escape from Iran’s border wrapped in a sheep’s skin. Maryam is always worried about her elderly parents and in constant visual connection with the home in Iran from thousands of kilometers through surveillance cameras. These cameras take her to the days of the 1979 revolution. Today, Iran is again experiencing turbulent days and now Maryam encounters her revolutionary past and revolutionary girls who are challenging the present system.

When the past re-emerges, it can prove to be uncontrollable and become another present, the here and now of a space that is contemporaneously clear-cut and indefinite, suspended within a frame of mind that can take your breath away. The movie is a journey inside this dimension, as it recounts what it means to cross this threshold and teeter between unexpected tears and sudden laughter. A reflection on old age and what you can discover by looking at yourself in this mirror, the film is the outcome of a long process of listening and dozens of lengthy encounters in five regions in Italy, in search of yesterday’s world, that sometimes seems very far away and sometimes strangely present.

Chioggia, Southern part of the Venice Lagoon, 5am. Like every day Andrea is on a boat with Michele his grandfather and Cristian his father, to fish sea urchins, a delicacy they sell at the wholesale fish market. This is how Andrea who is 14, decided to spend his summer holidays this year, to learn a trade that his family has been practising for decades. Facing his first experiences in the lagoon, Andrea discovers one of his possible futures.