by Erica Liffredo
Italia , 2015, 54'
Associazione Culturale FalenaKeller (Roma)
A woman finds the pictures of the mountains where she grew up in a photo album. She decides to go to the USA to meettheir author, the American photographer Clemens Kalischer. Later, she goes back to her valley, finally ready to embrace the magic that she was not able to see until now.
Travelling again through the same road that more than fifty years ago led Clemens to her mountains, she meets people who praise their love for this land, everyone in a different way. Catterina, an old lady who writes her memories in her diaries everyday, not to let the time gone by be forgotten. In Campofei, a small village abandoned more than sixty years ago, 4 dreamers are changing their lives to realize their dream to take this place back to life and work. Not far from there, a family struggle everyday to keep the Occitan language and culture alive, only spoken in this little land in Italy. Giovanni, protagonist of Clemens’ pictures as a child, recognizes his old memories in those photos.
The first time that I saw Clemens’s pictures it was love at first sight: the faces’ expressions, the looks, the movements are reality frozen in a moment, that reports with all its devastating force the suffering, the effort, the beginning of the departure. The Valleys immortalized by Clemens in their vanishing daily life are the ones where I grew up, where I’m still living. Clemens had the ability to capture their essence. I had the luck of meeting this extraordinary photographer and man, who crossed almost a century of our history and is still able to be astonished for things that we, sometimes, don't even see. I’m sure that Clemens represents an unique opportunity for looking at ourselves in the mirror and, at the same time, for observing the world, not only through his pictures, but also through his person. A look to the past and to the future “without a happy ending, to leave it to the viewers to bring in their own voice”.
Trento Film Festival 2015 - proiezione speciale