Tonino De Bernardi

India’s dream was our (Europeans and Americans) dream in late sixties, in Europe and USA. What is it now, 2016? All the world has changed, and not in better, as then we dreamt. India too. A travel through time and life.

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This last short of Tonino De Bernardi is a meditative film about his life and cinema: he recovers an experimental short film made in the 60s and sticks in the final part of the film a sequence with his grandson - a line of continuity between Tonino's cinema and grandson's life.

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Portraits of women, stories from their past and their present as prostitutes working between Italy and France (and Brazil). Women who used to think they were lost, and men just as lost as them.

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“Why did you kill her?” Lou asks Philippe again. The life-odyssey of Joana, a modern-day Moll Flanders, continues as she moves through different times and places, like the stations of a personal via crucis, with occasional leaps into the present. From Paris to Rome and on to São Paulo. The body has lost every value, except the economic one.

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A young woman wanders down an endless corridor, while other people knock at a door at night. A man takes a picture of Montmartre, two women hand him some money, while a patron manages from rue de Mhyra a network of Italian call girls. Adiba sings an ancient Moroccan song in a room full of children, while Vidya is performing her daily puja in Pune (India). Giuli sings to herself as she drives at night through Turin and runs to the station at day. Parallel stories where every character is caught “in a situation,” closed.

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Adventure of children and adults, fancied trips and everyday tragedies. The city and the countryside. Real and dreamt life. An experimental film inspired to the life of Emilio Salgari and his novel Yolanda, daughter of the Black Corsair. The movie is part of a series produced by Quarto Film on the 150th anniversary of Salgari's birth.

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A film in seven chapters. A documentary overwhelmed by life. A story with no plot. A trip. From the countryside to cities, from Italy to India to Greece. Through the ages and generations, through the work of farmers and the exploitation of migrant bodies. In the end, the singing and music lead you elsewhere, to the pleasure of discovery.

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Irene moves to Paris to begin a new life with her husband Jason and their two daughters, but an act of betrayal and her desire for revenge soon sends her to the brink of madness.

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A quest for the identity of the mysterious Madame Butterfly. While the farmers till the land, she waits in distress for her American love Pinkerton, who promised to be reunited with her.

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The lives of young migrants in Turin. From the words they want - they can say, the young migrants seem not have a past, no dreams... Who knows them? And who is willing to help them?

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Short film directed by Tonino Be Bernardi.

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A video by Tonino De Bernardi

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A video by Tonino De Bernardi

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Husband and wife Carlo and Grazia make bread in their wood-burning oven and also distribute it to the sellers. They work all night long, every day of the week, as their families used to do. They live in Gorgiti, a village in Tuscany, on the mountains near Arezzo. On the other hand, in Rome, some young people live near Camellia's Square at Centocelle, in the suburbs. We see them at different moments in their lives. Their existences seem to belong to distant and very different universes. There seems to be an irreconcilable generation conflict. The film makes use of documentary and fiction, but tries to amalgamate them while simultaneously using them as opposites.

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A film about various forms of migration: those of place, time, body and identity.

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Betty, a famous brasilian 'telenovelas' star, is in search of her twin sister Marlene, who vanished when the kids were four years old (Marlene is now a prostitute). Fragments of other stories, like that of an italian traveller Filippo who left in Italy Giuli, pregnant, and claims to have a split-personality, are inter-twined with the main one

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Three young women at home, the eye of the camera doesn't leave them for a moment and shows them first in a narrow kitchen, then in a small bathroom in front of a mirror, then in a bare living room where they spend part of the evening. The three are the mistress of the house and her servants, and the film is based on Les Bonnes by Genet. The servants pretend to unite to varying degrees against their mistress, and she, in turn, pretends to be a mistress who doesn't give explicit orders but who makes herself admired anyway. Each one of them plays the part that is most congenial to her.

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“A film of glimpses of ordinary persecution or exploitation, fragments of a love speech, that is, from different states of ordinary injustice. A film wandering from one latitude to another in the rejection of a definition. The spring for filming disparity and exploitation, social and not only, plus the irrepressible personal desire to film, testify, and overflow." – Tonino De Bernardi

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A Neopolitan hustler named Antonello is living his life in Torino. He turns tricks as a transvestite, using the name Rosatigre, or more commonly, Rosa. His closest pal is Wanda, who exercises the same “profession” and, being his best friend, is also the incarnation of his feminine alter ego. While we watch the two of them hanging out on the street, sweet and carefree as the young Moll Flanders, we eavesdrop on their exchange of confidences and learn the secret details of their private lives. Wanda could have been a teacher but she preferred the street, where she can indulge her sentimental, dreamy nature in sighing over the "Americano" she once met in Naples, for whom she still carries a torch.

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This film tells three different love stories, or alleged love stories, or, nevertheless, stories of sentimental relationships set in the Lazio countryside, Rome, and Naples. This is the reiteration - in different days and in different places - of an encounter among three people that (perhaps) may turn out to be fatal.

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This is a story about a Neapolitan guy, Antonello, immigrant in Turin, who, for a living, hooks on the street as Rosatigre. Sasà, a friend of his, tries to bring him back to Naples, but, after a tortured decision, Antonello chooses to come back North and to keep living “on the street”.

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Pina was born in Portugal but now lives in poor circumstances in Naples. Pina has two daughters, Rosa, who has been wearing a wedding dress since she was left stranded at the altar several years ago, and Caterina, who murdered a man who wronged her as he left the church following his wedding. Caterina winds up in prison alongside Maddalena, a prostitute who witnessed the murder and was inspired to kill a man in her own life who had hurt her. The incidents from these women's lives are interspersed with another story, set in 1929 and filmed in black-and-white, about a man who shoots his wife in a movie theater and must run to avoid the police.

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A whole summer long, Portuguese filmmaker Teresa Villaverde stayed with Italian cult director Tonino De Bernardi, who was working on projects including a film version of Sophocles’ Electra starring only local villagers. She sits at the table with the family in their garden, on the back seat of the car on the way home in the evening or listens to the stories told by the woman De Bernardi buys cheese and eggs from.

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Stephen Dwoskin’s final film is a meditation on the subjective experience and cultural concepts of ageing. The film is an ode to the texture, the beauty, the singularity of aging faces and silhouettes, a hypnotic poem in the Dwoskin meaning of the term which is long observations of very tiny details. A gesture, a pause, a look, a moment. Throughout his films intimacy has always played a leading role and this is also true for Age is..., all the faces being close friends, or close friends relatives and sometimes even Stephen himself.

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Italian film-maker Tonino De Bernardi meets in rural Liguria an old countrywoman, Agnese, and her chickens.

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This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.

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Giovanni, a young boy who left Sicily for Bolzano to perform his military service , arrives five days early and is forced to stay outside the barracks before the official day of the call-up. Between surreal encounters and situations of all kinds, Giovanni is the protagonist of various events and movements from various cities and countries; however, once he returns to Bolzano, the boy decides not to show up for the call and flees to Australia where his cousin Vince lives and works.

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Tonino De Bernardi, author of self-produced films, many Super8 and videos, talks about cinema and Turin. Shot on U-matic.

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Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

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Shot between Italy and New York City, Warming Up is the journal of a season of creativity. The film-maker and his characters improvise scenes and sequences, and wonder how to make up a story as they go along. The recurring theme is how to make the world (or read it as) an imaginative place...

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A conclusion and recapitulation of the Eryngium cycle, Coda deals directly with the theme of self-portraiture. The first shot alludes to the end of Erichvon Stroheim's Foolish Wives, where the corpse of the hero-director is dispatched in a man-hole. Other dramatic self-portraits follow: Caravaggio's Goliath, Dante's Sestina (read by the film-maker), and Dürer's Self-portrait with Eryngium. The abandoned villa of Migrazione is revisited. But the finale is hopeful.

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Unfinished feature film by Piero Bargellini.

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A series of migrants who at times narrate and impersonate shards of myths, among them the Great Goddess, the Virgin of Bach’s Magnificat, the Sulamite of Stockhausen’s Song of Solomon (“I am black but comely”), tales by Herodotus, Kafka, Villon (as set to music by Ezra Pound). Third part of the Flower of Eryngium cycle.

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It exists only in a fragmented state.

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The construction of the film is very simple. Most of the time we see faces in close-up. Three pairs of faces, usually, on three different levels of superimpositions. At first, the faces are very theatrical, made-up. It's not clear whether they are men or women. They move only slightly. They are, indeed, godlike. As the film progresses, very unnoticeably, these faces begin to gain more life and masculine and feminine qualities. At the end of the film, after three hours, the faces are very real, and very human, and sexes and ages are very clearly defined: men, women, children.

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Short made for double parallel projections, for which Allen Ginsberg said that it's his favorite underground European film, debut from the director, cheeky hommage to B-movies.

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Portraits of women, stories from their past and their present as prostitutes working between Italy and France (and Brazil). Women who used to think they were lost, and men just as lost as them.

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“Why did you kill her?” Lou asks Philippe again. The life-odyssey of Joana, a modern-day Moll Flanders, continues as she moves through different times and places, like the stations of a personal via crucis, with occasional leaps into the present. From Paris to Rome and on to São Paulo. The body has lost every value, except the economic one.

Open details →

A young woman wanders down an endless corridor, while other people knock at a door at night. A man takes a picture of Montmartre, two women hand him some money, while a patron manages from rue de Mhyra a network of Italian call girls. Adiba sings an ancient Moroccan song in a room full of children, while Vidya is performing her daily puja in Pune (India). Giuli sings to herself as she drives at night through Turin and runs to the station at day. Parallel stories where every character is caught “in a situation,” closed.

Open details →

Adventure of children and adults, fancied trips and everyday tragedies. The city and the countryside. Real and dreamt life. An experimental film inspired to the life of Emilio Salgari and his novel Yolanda, daughter of the Black Corsair. The movie is part of a series produced by Quarto Film on the 150th anniversary of Salgari's birth.

Open details →

A film in seven chapters. A documentary overwhelmed by life. A story with no plot. A trip. From the countryside to cities, from Italy to India to Greece. Through the ages and generations, through the work of farmers and the exploitation of migrant bodies. In the end, the singing and music lead you elsewhere, to the pleasure of discovery.

Open details →

Irene moves to Paris to begin a new life with her husband Jason and their two daughters, but an act of betrayal and her desire for revenge soon sends her to the brink of madness.

Open details →

A quest for the identity of the mysterious Madame Butterfly. While the farmers till the land, she waits in distress for her American love Pinkerton, who promised to be reunited with her.

Open details →

Husband and wife Carlo and Grazia make bread in their wood-burning oven and also distribute it to the sellers. They work all night long, every day of the week, as their families used to do. They live in Gorgiti, a village in Tuscany, on the mountains near Arezzo. On the other hand, in Rome, some young people live near Camellia's Square at Centocelle, in the suburbs. We see them at different moments in their lives. Their existences seem to belong to distant and very different universes. There seems to be an irreconcilable generation conflict. The film makes use of documentary and fiction, but tries to amalgamate them while simultaneously using them as opposites.

Open details →

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A film about various forms of migration: those of place, time, body and identity.

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Betty, a famous brasilian 'telenovelas' star, is in search of her twin sister Marlene, who vanished when the kids were four years old (Marlene is now a prostitute). Fragments of other stories, like that of an italian traveller Filippo who left in Italy Giuli, pregnant, and claims to have a split-personality, are inter-twined with the main one

Open details →

Three young women at home, the eye of the camera doesn't leave them for a moment and shows them first in a narrow kitchen, then in a small bathroom in front of a mirror, then in a bare living room where they spend part of the evening. The three are the mistress of the house and her servants, and the film is based on Les Bonnes by Genet. The servants pretend to unite to varying degrees against their mistress, and she, in turn, pretends to be a mistress who doesn't give explicit orders but who makes herself admired anyway. Each one of them plays the part that is most congenial to her.

Open details →

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A Neopolitan hustler named Antonello is living his life in Torino. He turns tricks as a transvestite, using the name Rosatigre, or more commonly, Rosa. His closest pal is Wanda, who exercises the same “profession” and, being his best friend, is also the incarnation of his feminine alter ego. While we watch the two of them hanging out on the street, sweet and carefree as the young Moll Flanders, we eavesdrop on their exchange of confidences and learn the secret details of their private lives. Wanda could have been a teacher but she preferred the street, where she can indulge her sentimental, dreamy nature in sighing over the "Americano" she once met in Naples, for whom she still carries a torch.

Open details →

This film tells three different love stories, or alleged love stories, or, nevertheless, stories of sentimental relationships set in the Lazio countryside, Rome, and Naples. This is the reiteration - in different days and in different places - of an encounter among three people that (perhaps) may turn out to be fatal.

Open details →

This is a story about a Neapolitan guy, Antonello, immigrant in Turin, who, for a living, hooks on the street as Rosatigre. Sasà, a friend of his, tries to bring him back to Naples, but, after a tortured decision, Antonello chooses to come back North and to keep living “on the street”.

Open details →

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Pina was born in Portugal but now lives in poor circumstances in Naples. Pina has two daughters, Rosa, who has been wearing a wedding dress since she was left stranded at the altar several years ago, and Caterina, who murdered a man who wronged her as he left the church following his wedding. Caterina winds up in prison alongside Maddalena, a prostitute who witnessed the murder and was inspired to kill a man in her own life who had hurt her. The incidents from these women's lives are interspersed with another story, set in 1929 and filmed in black-and-white, about a man who shoots his wife in a movie theater and must run to avoid the police.

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The story of certain "wayfarers", whose origin is linked to each of the four elements. Lucas Belvaux (Triton) is a creature of the sea and does not know the use of his legs, while Ines De Medeiros (Syrène) has already been on land for some time and is starting to get used to the upright position. Lou Castel (Vent) comes from the air and in his wanderings comes across the group of Sirens and Sirens who have become terrestrial. He is a 15th century fresco painter who goes from place to place through the centuries for his work, destined not to die and to always ask.

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A woman in her flooded kitchen thinks of Ophelia and death by drowning. A nun wonders about her vocation. A girl, dumb by choice, walks around in Naples. A ballerina in a wheelchair. Three youths around a bonfire in a little island. A man secluded in a tower waiting for the end of the world. And many other stories.

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In this film every person (or character) says that he or she is a certain bird, but this may not be true after all, because every one of them in the meantime keeps on being, or appearing to be, a person. And, meanwhile, there is someone who is searching for real birds the kind that fly. Where have they all gone?

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Elettra is adapted from the tragedy of Sophocles and played by non-professional actors of Casalborgone.

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Shot by Tonino De Bernardi in 1986 before his 'Elettra' made for RAI.

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The construction of the film is very simple. Most of the time we see faces in close-up. Three pairs of faces, usually, on three different levels of superimpositions. At first, the faces are very theatrical, made-up. It's not clear whether they are men or women. They move only slightly. They are, indeed, godlike. As the film progresses, very unnoticeably, these faces begin to gain more life and masculine and feminine qualities. At the end of the film, after three hours, the faces are very real, and very human, and sexes and ages are very clearly defined: men, women, children.

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4 screens overlapping in part in the shape of a crooked cross and having initially each petal a single color and scent but then resulting in a corolla of rose, lily-of-the-valley, lily, cornflower, and fragrant artichoke. "My bestiary".

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Performance based experimental film.

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