Concorto Daily – August, 19

Uomo in mare – Emanuele Palamara
seen by Yorgos Kostianis

In this film, Emanuele Palamara tackles the hardships of Marco, a former judicial witness whose life and family are crumbling under the burden of his choice to testify. Palamara sheds light to the untold lives of judicial witnesses, often abandoned by the very State that swore to protect them. We witness the protagonist wrestling with his own conscience as he watches his family pay the price for his morality by living in hiding and fear. Much like the hero of his son’s make-believe game, he finds himself stranded at sea, hopelessly waiting for an allegorical rescue helicopter that never seems to arrive. A special mention should also go to the film’s evocative soundtrack, composed by Lilia Scandurra.

Point and Shoot – Thomas Leisten
seen by Yorgos Kostianis

There are films that are so meta, that they blur the line between fantasy and reality; and then there’s Point and Shoot, where there is no such line. The film opens with a couple of aspiring crooks, in a car, prepping for a heist; only to be mugged themselves, by none other than legendary actor, Donald Sutherland. Yet things are not quite as simple as they seem. The brief and hilarious exchange between these dorkish and lovable would-be criminals is filled with double meanings that craftily foreshadow an unexpected twist.

United Interest – Tim Weinmann
seen by Silvia Alberti

A black and white XIX century city is the background of a sad parade that puts on screen the many obscure events of XX century America. Uncle Sam my arse: black Friday, second world war, economic boom, ku klux klan, hope-speculations, real estate crisis, the third industrial revolution. Tim Weinmann: the most irritating thing is that you’re absolutely right.

Dekalb Elementary – Reed Van Dyk
seen by Carlotta Magistris

Based on a true story happened in ab elementary school in Georgia, Dekalb Elementary is the fourth short movie directed by Reed Van Dyk, a young and talented film director from Los Angeles. The film is all shot in a school’s secretary where an armed man bursts in with a rifle. With no extradiegetic sound and interpreted by just two actors, thanks to minimal choices and in about twenty minutes – the same time represented on the screen – the movie hits the point, mainly thanks to the empathy which it creates in the viewer towards both characters, which find themselves in an extreme but plausible situation. Also characterised by a good interpretation, the film seems to be even more meaningful if projected in the American context, where it finds several references both in society and in cinematography.

Gure Hormek (Our Walls) – Maria Elorza & Maider Fernandez
seen by Elena Saltarelli

This 15-minutes-long short film, realized in a documentary style, highlights with rare sensibility the emotional personification of the living spaces. Homes, walls, cities assimilate the intimacy and transcend their objective function, turning into icons to which voice is given.The result is a modern and melancholy fado, in which the architectonic saudade is sung softly by a heterogeneous group of women, who share the idea that our walls pay tribute to those we love.

Einstein-Rosen – Olga Osorio
seen by Yorgos Kostianis

Tackling a theme as complex and mindboggling like as that of the Einstein-Rosen wormhole theory, is surely no easy task. Olga Rosorio, however, makes this task hilariously entertaining. Her film’s protagonist is a young boy named Teo, who tries to convince his brother, Óscar, that he found an active wormhole. The scientific dispute between the young brothers gives an endearingly comical tone to the film that is maintained even after 3 decades, when the protagonists – by now fully-grown adults – continue their juvenile skirmishes.

A Gentle Night – Yang Qiu
seen by Margherita Fontana

The events we experience in A Gentle Night are anything but gentle: set in a Chinese nameless urban context and inspired by local crime news, the short movie shows indeed a woman desperately searching for her 13-year-old daughter, run away from home during New Year’s Eve. Winner of Short Film Palme d’Or at Cannes Festival in 2017, the work by Qiu Yang, a young Chinese director who studied in Australia, brings on the screen subjects poorly represented in the official culture of his home country: women, mothers and daughters. In spite of the realistic visual language with political overtones, the actuality of what has happened fades in the mother’s emotional state, whose central role in the film is progressively affirmed. In front of the gestures of denial and indifference, maybe only the night is gentle, attending woman’s whispers.

Le Plombier (The Plumber) – Méryl Fortunat-Rossi & Xavier Séron
seen by Elena Saltarelli

Being a porn dubber is certainly a little-known job: this 14 minutes-long short film investigates with a fascinated and mischievous eye those who give voice to a genre that doesn’t need so many words.

Defined by their own directors a comédie érotico-acostique, it mixes the abundance of details, a significant sound effect, allusive and puns-filled dialogues with the naive and light-hearted characters so dear to the French comedy. We do not see very much, but we can imagine everything easily.