Atlas Of Memory

Synopsis

The passion for vintage photos mixed with coincidences led Lorenzo to discover the visual archive and the researches of the linguist Ugo Pellis. His own desire to go looking for the children of those pictures, instead, leads him to take a journey in the places explored by Pellis in the ’30s.

Lorenzo travels through Friuli, the place where Pellis started his researches, and Sardinia, where the most of the pictures had been taken. Mainly exploring small villages, the only objects Lorenzo has to pursue his research are the almost hundred years old photos. Usual locations of investigations are elderly houses, senior centers, bars. The research, though, often becomes door-to-door.

The journey becomes a carousel of experiences, places and encounters, twists of fate and surprises, where people and their memories are the real protagonists.

In the end, as every other journey, Pellis’ journey is just a pretext. It allows us  ourselves to “wander” around and to observe, comparing the traces of the past with the signs of the present. It gives us the time to listen and to forward testimonies. Most of all, is a catalyst to talk about memory through different perspectives: community, identity, love, death.

It is a game in which intimate memories and stories blend with the story of a population and a country. A game that involves everybody.

Director’s notes

Ugo Pellis was not a professional photographer. Nevertheless, as a support to his linguistic investigations, he consciously photographed everyday life in ‘lesser Italy’. In the past years, that very Italy would have quickly disappeared and swallowed up by the economic boom and the new industrialization of the country in the immediate post-war period. Guided by Pellis’ researches and tracks, I imagined a modern journey to compare his research with today’s reality. A journey through small villages of Italy that could give us new paradigms to understand the change of society in the last hundred years. A journey that can question our contemporary understanding of the social sphere, exposing the conflicted and distracted relation that our late-modern, post-industrial, digitalized culture entertains with the past and the present. A path that inflects the theme of memory both in past and present.

Dorino Minigutti

Credits

Year: 2019
Production: Agherose
Director: Dorino Minigutti
Screenplay: Dorino Minigutti, Lorenzo Fabbro
Director of Photography: Debora Vrizzi

In collaboration with Friulian Filological Society (Udine)

Developed and made with the contribution of the Audiovisual Fund of Friuli Venezia Giulia

Festival

  • Finalist at Prague Film Awards 2022;
  • ОКО-International Ethnographic Film Festival;
  • Mittelfest 2021;
  • 69° Trento Film Festival 2021 – section “Terre alte”.