Docufiction by Costanza Quatriglio
Within the ITALIA FILM FESTIVAL
Terramatta; is a symphony of landscapes – old and new, near and far – filmed with the help of electronic music and archives. The story is brought to life by Vincenzo Rabito, an illiterate Sicilian, through a blend of imaginary, musical language – neither Italian nor dialect. A striking storyteller, he recounts Italian twentieth century history through thousands of dictated, tightly written, rope-bound pages, tracing the extremes of a century marked by poverty and economic boom, disgrace and redemption. Rabito gives an impassioned and unique autobiographical perspective on a complicated part of Italian history, forcing his audience to face up to contradictory and uncomfortable truths.
“Rabito, the storyteller, marches through a century of collective events penetrating them with the ink of his grammatically incorrect pen. Thanks to this, official historiographical interpretations are constantly contradicted. I have reinvented the meaning of black and white films, dirtying them with blue, green, red and yellow ink. Terramatta; is a subjective, on the road kind of film – because he was a road traveller… He went everywhere on foot, and I filmed streets thinking about how he saw them. Long, dusty roads, soft and silent backstreets; an obstinate and solitary pace – just like the tip-tapping of his typewriter.” (Costanza Quatriglio)
Costanza Quatriglio (Palermo, Italy 1973) is a law graduate, with a diploma in film directing from the Experimental Centre for Film-Making (Centro Sperimentale per la Cinematografia). While Quatriglio started her career as a full-length film director at the Quinzaine des Realisateurs in 2003 with L´Isola, she is also the director of many critically acclaimed documentary films. These include Ècosaimale?, which was awarded the Jury Prize at the Turin festival in 2000, L´insonnia di Devi in 2001, Racconti per l’isola, presented at the Venice Film Festival in 2003, Raìz, a three-part miniseries shown on Italian national television in 2004, Il mondo addosso, presented at the Rome Film Festival in 2006, Il mio cuore umano, a special production for the International Locarno Festival in 2009, Breve film d´amore e libertà, presented at the Rome International Film Festival in 2010 and Io, qui lo sguardo delle donne in 2012.