Synopsis
Cultural, identity and religious diversity distinguish the 5 women protagonists of Shapes Recording. What they have in common is the choice to come and live in Italy from France, Japan, Iran, Angola and Germany. Their stories exalt the Italy of art and beauty as in the words of Satomi: "I came to Italy because I wanted to learn the voice of Mirella Freni, beautiful beautiful voice, pure bel canto ... it's her, Italy for me was her" and praise the luxury of being able to choose where to live, as Linda, an Anglo-Moroccan born in Paris, declares. Shapes Recording is an alternative reading of the migrant, commonly associated with the victim, the disadvantaged, who by necessity is forced to leave his country of origin, focusing instead on a change by choice determined by needs of an intimate and intellectual nature, in contrast to the flight of Italians abroad.
Director's notes
"Behind the border there was something both foreign and mine; I understood that I was also part of that world behind it, that literature is a journey between the known and the unknown and that one is always, in some way, also on the other side".
While reading Claudio Magris' definition of frontier, I was reminded of the testimonies of the women I interviewed for Shapes Recording. Listening to their stories, I felt that in their migratory project there was an unknown dimension, foreign to them, but at the same time in the country they had chosen, there was something strong that belonged to them, represented by literary, artistic, cinematographic suggestions, and by the imagination that they had built about our country.
Migrating and settling in Italy, all this has turned into their new identity and the awareness of being part of this world, different from that of their origins.
I am convinced that we belong to several cultural worlds and I am convinced that the confrontation with our otherness can be closer to us than we can imagine, to the point of identifying more with them, than identifying with our origins.
We are above all where we go, not just where we come from.
With this documentary I asked myself what are the real frontiers? What is our true identity?
Identity is something changeable, which can take different forms in the course of life, being born in a place is completely random, our origins give us an identity that can belong to us or it can be something in which at a certain point we no longer identify, or only partially, And this discomfort leads us to go in search of something else in unknown worlds, because it is our identity itself that is something "foreign" to ourselves. Our identity is always on the move.
The cultural frontier, the identity frontier is therefore an ephemeral thing, as is the geographical frontier.
Our country, Italy, for geographical reasons, is subjected to migratory flows to which politics seems to have no constructive responses, but only based on violence and deadly.
I wonder when we will be able to cross our borders, which are mainly mental, not geographical.
Credits
Year: Italy - 2013
Running time: 15'
Production: CAUCASO
Direction and photography: GIULIANA FANTONI
Producer: STEFANO MIGLIORE
Editing: ALBERTO GEMMI and GIULIA JAPANESE
Audio: ENRICO MASI
Post-audio: DIEGO SCHIAVO
Communication: STEFANO CROCI
Subtitles: VALENTINA SOLURI
Music: ZENDE MUSIC