Franco Piavoli. ‘Il Pianeta Azzurro’
Tuesday 15 November 2022
- Artists
- Franco Piavoli
- Venue
- Filmoteca de Catalunya
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Piavoli’s first feature film is a visual and sonic symphony on nature and its inhabitants: humans, animals, and plants. This unique film, which follows the rhythm of the seasons and the secrets of the earth and which has no dialogues or music, was shot by the filmmaker in the area around lake Garda. In it he displays biological evolution and the fundamental aspects of life (play and love, work and rest, coexistence and aggression) as fragments of a fascinating cosmic balance. “A poem, a journey, a concert of nature, of the universe, of life. An different vision from what we usually see” (Andrei Tarkovsky).
Franco Piavoli
1933, Pozzolengo, Lombardia
Franco Piavoli was born in Pozzolengo, a small town in Lombardy, in 1933 and, without leaving this region, he rose to become a universal author owing to his refined and highly personal view of his rural environment and the ancestral behaviour of mankind.
His films, which have been praised by figures such as Ermanno Olmi, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean Rouch, or Stan Brakhage, touches transcendent aspects of existence, such as childhood, old age, love or loneliness, and it lyrically conveys the passing of time through the succession of the cycles of life and of seasons. Their purpose is to capture the harmonious balance of nature, and to make a nostalgic rediscovery of the beauty of paradise lost, of simple living.
With only five feature films and a handful of shorts, crafted with the painstaking patience of a true artisan (he writes, directs, shoots, and edits his own films), Piavoli skilfully blends the documentary and fiction genres, exploring the mystery of the world that surrounds us without requiring dialogues, and with a camera that carefully captures the intrinsic poetry of the movements, lighting and sound offered to us by the beating heart of nature.