Les Champs brûlants

Off the beaten tracks: this is how Catherine Libert and Stefano Canapa name their journey across Italy, to meet its independent filmmakers. Les Champs brûlants, the first part, is the fruit of their encounter with a “life-and-cinema couple”, Beppe Gaudino and Isabella Sandri, and with the critic Enrico Ghezzi, filmed near the Circo Massimo. The film excerpts astutely inserted into the thread of the journey are enough to gauge the extent to which the “Gaundri” approach is rooted in the geographical and social specificities. Isabella wanders through the Roman borgate already filmed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Beppe, marked by an earthquake in his hometown when he was eleven years old, takes Catherine to the extraordinary landscapes of the “burning fields”. Already as a teenager, Beppe had filmed in S8 this volcanic zone of the Bay of Naples with its ancient buildings destroyed by a geological phenomenon. Impossible to not link these magnificent ruins with the state of independent filmmaking in Berlusconi’s Italy. As lunar as the ruins, it survives inexplicably, through no heroic posture but with what Beppe Gaudino, who hadn’t made a film for thirteen years, says is “our privilege: time”

Charlotte Garson.