Rä di Martino

Once upon a time there was a garden, a refuge, a safe haven - 'The Garden of the Finzi Continis'. It came to life in Giorgio Bassani's 1962 semi-autobiographical novel recounting an unfulfilled love story between two young Jews in Ferrara, while fascism was raging in Italy in the late 1930's. In 1972, Vittorio De Sica's film adaptation of the book won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Since then, the fictional space of the garden became so tangible that people from all over the world come to Ferrara to look for it. Fifty years after winning the Oscar, reality and fiction come together once more, as we walk through an imaginary garden and bring to life the book, its author, its main protagonists, history, love, friendships and betrayals.

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A small film crew is wandering about Marrakesh and the surrounding desert. They are looking for locations for the remake of an American film in which a man swims his way home, passing through the houses and pools that he finds along the route. Corrado is the stand in used to test the shots, locations and the swimming pools in which the lead will be filmed. While we watch his attempts to get into the part, the real actors and a real crew burst onto the scene, on a set in which no one is in the right place. A film with a crisis of identity, in a surreal search for itself.

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Short movie by Ra di Martino.

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The artist Rä di Martino celebrates MAS, Rome's historic "people's warehouses," with a documentary that blurs the lines between reality and fiction.

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The video work Authentic News of Invisible Things is inspired directly by archive footage taken in the French City of Lille in 1918 which depicts a group of civilians gathered around a dummy tank abandoned by the retreating German army. Recreating and filming the historical scene in black and white, she pulls back switching to colour to reveal the cinematographer's devices. This contemporary footage is then interlaced with the original to create a complex dialogue between layers of reality, fiction and staging that simultaneously corroborate and mock one another. The effect is a reassuring distance between the observer and the image; a distance that the artist undermines in a further channel of video when a real tank is driven into the streets of the sleepy Italian town of Bolzano and the reactions of local inhabitants is recorded. This final gesture takes the work full circle, creating real encounters between people and an actual war machine but without the context of battle.

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"August 2008" is conceived as a tableau vivant based on an image that was first created in the mind of the artist who then took a cue to formalize it from a scene from Billy Wilder's film "The Lost Weekend".

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The camera turns, slowly; we are near a hill, in a world where everything is absurd. The "voice actors" recite a banal script overlapping, in perfect synchrony, the actors' mouths and gestures. The setting and costumes have no relation to the scene. A voice actor recites Shakespeare instead of the script; the confusion continues when the scene ends.

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