Viaggio nel crepuscolo (Journey Into the Twilight)

Part of the New Italian Cinema Events (N.I.C.E.) Film Festival
Celebrating its 32^nd edition in the United States

In collaboration with
CIMA (Center for Italian Modern Art)

Screening
Viaggio nel crepuscolo (Journey Into the Twilight)
(2021, Documentary, 142 min.)
In ITALIAN with ENGLISH subtitles

Written and Directed by
Augusto Contento

From an idea by
Adriano Aprà

Featuring
Marco Bellocchio
Paola Pitagora
Roberto Herlitzka

Followed by a Q&A with
Adriano Aprà, producer and film critic
David Forgacs, NYU
Nicola Lucchi, CIMA

Moderated by Stefano Albertini, NYU

In ENGLISH

About the film:
Journey into the Twilight walks the roads that lead into the cold darkness of the Italian decline: that of the family, of patriarchal society, of educational institutions, and of religion. It is a land where the common, public, shared space with the interiors of a colorless, amorphous egoism, where even revolutionary, socialist, communist ideals, mixed with Manichaean Catholicism, have turned into fideistic and totalitarian dogmas. Right from the opening theme, the animation created expresses this mixture of ghostly, austere and decadent, elegant and dilapidated places. Constantly mixing fiction and documentary, the film has a structure capable of radically deconstructing narrative forms.

Bellocchio’s films from which the director started become poetic lines which, arranged in a particular narrative order, create new meaning; the same goes for archives, where their use is no longer functional to narration but to poetry. Journey into the Twilight is based on a “quantum” montage. The director uses multiple stylistic features and film genres as if they were parallel universes that reflect, split, multiply one into the other, determining the form, rhythm and content of the filmic space-time. The ultimate goal is to talk about important Italian and international issues through unusual perspectives, beginning with Bellocchio and continuing, as if traveling on a thin border line, towards a universe that wants to give a new voice to workers and peasants by crystallizing some epochal turning points. The final scene of the film, with a horse vanishing into the icy road of a non-place that can be anywhere and nowhere, in a different, utopian universe, is the emblem of the film itself.

About the Director:
Augusto Contento was born on January 22, 1973, in Lanciano (Italy). He has been living in Paris since 2000, where he created the cinema production company Cineparallax with Giancarlo Grande. His first documentary, “Onibus”, won Best Italian Documentary Award at the Bellaria Festival. His second and third full-length documentaries, “Tramas” and “Transparent Roads”, were selected by the Locarno Film Festival and the BAFICI of Buenos Aires. Roads of Water was selected by the Rome Film Festival where it was introduced and supported by Mme Danielle Mitterrand, making Contento the first director to be distributed worldwide by UNESCO. His sixth movie, Parallax Sounds won the UCCA Award at the Turin Film Festival and was selected by the Reykjavik International Film Festival and by IndieLisbõa.