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CANCELLED: The Power Plant Film Series “Italian Colonial Cinema”: Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana (Notes Towards an African Orestes)

THIS SCREENING (MARCH 31) HAS BEEN CANCELLED

 

 

The Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini aimed to establish an Italian empire in Africa. In 1935, Mussolini provoked a political dispute with Abyssinian (modern Ethiopian) Emperor, Haile Selassie, as justification for a military invasion. While there was international outrage, there was no military action taken against Mussolini. After World War II, the Treaty of Peace with Italy (1947) ended all of Italy’s overseas possessions, and yet there remain some relations between Italy and its former colonies.

This film series looks back to filmmakers contemporary with Mussolini, as well as more recent cinematic works examining Italy’s entanglement in Africa.

The Power Plant, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura and Istituto Luce Cinecittà present:

Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana
(Notes Towards an African Orestes)
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
1970, B&W, 65 minutes

Tuesday, 31 March 2020 | 7 PM

From Tanzania to Uganda, Pier Paolo Pasolini travels through Africa looking for the people and places for a “film to be made”, loosely inspired by the trilogy of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia. Africa, which in the 1960s was painfully emerging from centuries of colonialism, is seen by Pasolini as the space for a process of metamorphosis from the archaic world to modernity, where primordial irrationality must coexist with the “new world of reason”. It is the voice of Pasolini himself that guides the viewer through a filmic itinerary that that takes on a heterogeneous and “impure” nature of an essay through images, an anthropological analysis and a travel diary, with visionary and poetic glimpses. The images shot by the poet-director on Africa’s “deep and fearful silences” are confronted with violent documentary sequences on the Biafra war.

This Pasolini film, completed in 1973 and was unreleased for more than two years, until the days following the author’s death, is the only one of the poet-director to have been rejected by public broadcasters and for film distribution, not because it is considered ‘scandalous’, but because it is simply considered ‘difficult’, therefore not commercial.

ITALIAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES | FREE EVENT

CLICK HERE FOR INFORMATION

UPCOMING FILMS IN THE SERIES:

Tuesday, 7 April 2020, 7 PM
Come un uomo sulla terra
(Like a Man on Earth)
Directed by Andrea Segre, Dagmawi
Yimer and Riccardo Biadene
2008, colour, 60 minutes

Tuesday, 14 April 2020, 7 PM
Soltanto il mare
(Only the Sea)
Directed by Dagmawi Yimer,
Fabrizio Barraco and Giulio Cederna
2010, colour, 50 minutes

Tuesday, 21 April 2020, 7 PM
Sud Side Stori
(South Side Story)
Directed by Roberta Torre
2000, colour, 87 minutes

  • Organized by: The Power Plant | Istituto Italiano di Cultura | Istituto Luce Cinecittà