Pippo Delbono: La Paura

The director has made two films before but is more known in Italy as an actor and theatre director. The French Forum des Images gave him a mobile phone with camera and said to him: do what you want.

He chose – yes – to be mobile, went on a journey and the result is a fragmented very cinematic documentary essay about what he sees and gets involved in, in his country, Italy, most of the time accompanied by music and by text, which sometimes refers to the Divina Commedia of Dante.

Shop windows, perfect slim women, tv about fat children, a gym, filming his own stomach trying to make the camera catch his penis as well… other chapters with homeless people, intercut with tv commercials, xenophobic grafitti on the walls, ”someone should know what is going on this shitty country”, a racist murder, he goes to the funeral, which is also a demonstration (a policeman watches him constantly, photo), returning several times to a camp for romas with their vans, it is built like a music piece, and suddenly there is a classic film scene: a person in a car by the sea, it is raining cats and dogs outside, melancholy, but towards the end of the film mostly anger and paura, fear, conveyed with sarchasm when a long tv sequence lets a man perform animal sounds… cut to a man in a sofa, who is not able to talk, a man in an asylum, Bobo is his name, he has been there for 50 years, free from the outside Italian world.

Will be screened at Cinéma du Réel on the 27th and 29th of March. First long film, shot with a mobile phone, that I have seen. Director found the aesthetic limits and possibilities.

Italy, 2009, 66 mins.

www.cinereel.org

http://www.lesfilmsdici.fr

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Tue Steen Müller
Tue Steen Müller

Müller, Tue Steen
Documentary Consultant and Critic, DENMARK

Worked with documentary films for more than 20 years at the Danish Film Board, as press officer, festival representative and film consultant/commissioner. Co-founder of Balticum Film and TV Festival, Filmkontakt Nord, Documentary of the EU and EDN (European Documentary Network).
Awards: 2004 the Danish Roos Prize for his contribution to the Danish and European documentary culture. 2006 an award for promoting Portuguese documentaries. 2014 he received the EDN Award “for an outstanding contribution to the development of the European documentary culture”. 2016 The Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania. 2019 a Big Stamp at the 15th edition of ZagrebDox. 2021 receipt of the highest state decoration, Order of the Three Stars, Fourth Class, for the significant contribution to the development and promotion of Latvian documentary cinema outside Latvia. In 2022 he received an honorary award at DocsBarcelona’s 25th edition having served as organizer and programmer since the start of the festival.
From 1996 until 2005 he was the first director of EDN (European Documentary Network). From 2006 a freelance consultant and teacher in workshops like Ex Oriente, DocsBarcelona, Archidoc, Documentary Campus, Storydoc, Baltic Sea Forum, Black Sea DocStories, Caucadoc, CinéDOC Tbilisi, Docudays Kiev, Dealing With the Past Sarajevo FF as well as programme consultant for the festivals Magnificent7 in Belgrade, DOCSBarcelona, Verzio Budapest, Message2Man in St. Petersburg and DOKLeipzig. Teaches at the Zelig Documentary School in Bolzano Italy.

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