Gaddicianò
by Mattia Petullà
synopsis
Nino lives in Gallicianò, a village in Aspromonte, on the Ionian coast of Calabria, where ancient Greek has been preserved orally for thousands of years and where only a few elderly people still live.
Nino, a young shepherd, had gone far away like so many others to seek a better life, but he has returned to live in this place that is as austere as it is majestic.
His presence accompanies us through this landscape that is hostile to humans, but impossible for him to leave behind.
A succession of timeless moments, in which men, animals and natural elements lose the features that distinguish them, creates a tableau that harmonises the wonderful and frightening events that shape this landscape, so remote that it seems lunar.
The corpse of a goat devoured by a wolf, the suffering of a human being for an animal, the verses of a language that has almost disappeared, the human faces devoured by poverty and outlined by the shining of the sun make up a symphony where pain and beauty merge to the point of becoming elusive.
biography
Mattia Petullà graduated in Communication Sciences and specialised in cinema at the Alma mater studiorum university in Bologna. After working in a media activism project called ‘Telestreet’, against Berlusconi’s television monopoly in the 2000s, he contributed to the creation of a small independent production company, Elenfant Film, for which he worked as an editor and produced his first short films as a director.
His work often focuses on the “last” or “loosers”, always trying to highlight a bright side of them.
He is also interested in the impact of the environmental transformations produced by human societies on the individuals.
His approach is ethnographic. The material for the stories he wants to tell often comes from contexts he has frequented and experienced first-hand or through direct knowledge of people who have done so and who in many cases become protagonists of his films.
His first feature film is on the border between ethnographic documentary and fiction and tells the story of a young group of seasonal nomads workers in search of their place in the world; ‘Terra in vista’ was released at the end of 2022 in the international competition of the 26th Ji.hlava IDFF and distributed in other film festivals and vod plateformes.
For more information: mattiapetulla.com