America

Director:  Alessandro Stevanon, Production: Ezechiele 25:17 Film Production, Italy, 13′, 2013, Rights: World 

An imagined life where dwarves run free, with castles in the air and loving gestures. An existence lived in another place, another world, one step away from eternity.

Two hands kneading, the rustle of flour, the sewing machine making a hem by ticking, a whispered prayer among the beads of the rosary, the whistle of the train, the silence of days all the same, a courtyard that no longer exists and a life made of poetry. The narrator Pino America has a voice hoarse of regrets and deep with memories.

Pino whose real name is Giuseppe Bertuna was born in Sicily but grew up in Aosta, a small town at the foot of the Alps. In 1973 he left for the United States. He returned after three years and all that remained of his American dream was the nickname given to him by his friends; Pino America.

Directors statement:

“In America the lines between fiction and documentary are thin, almost lived by osmosis.

The film plays on this gender ambiguity, as well as on that narrative: the images sometimes underline the story, sometimes they move away from it. Ambiguities and dualisms become existential in the story of Pino America, a surreal character perpetually poised between dream and reality.

A story enclosed in a “short” not only for the technical choice, but above all stylistic as a metaphor of life itself: short and intense, but also unpredictable and sudden, like death. That life that Pino America provokes with Viking horns and erotic foul language. That death that allows him to survive and, with great humanity, restores earthly dignity to those who will never tell it. ”

Awards:

Best Short “Frammenti Film Festival” 2015

Motivation: “the author was able to carry out an emotional investigation into the life of the protagonist with elegance and sobriety. A careful and intense exploration that gives at the end an extraordinary quote from the great Leo Ferrè.”