Il giardino delle erbacce
by Virgilio Sieni, Italy 2017, 19'
SUBJECT AND SCREENPLAY: Virgilio Sieni   MUSIC: Eivind Aarset
CAMERA: Virgilio Sieni, Tommaso Ferrara     PRODUCTION: Compagnia Virgilio Sieni Centro Nazionale di produzione sui linguaggi del corpo e della danza, Accademia sull’arte del gesto con il contributo di Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze con il sostegno di Comune di Firenze - Quartiere 4 Isolotto Legnaia 
EDITING AND POST PRODUCTION:  Virgilio Sieni, Tommaso Ferrara     

Schermo dell'Arte - Archivio Film

Presented at Lo Schermo dell'arte 2017 

It’s dawn. A person, a loner, maybe a fugitive, is sitting in a fallow field. It seems like she’s waiting for something. Suddenly she’s attracted by a glow, a reflection on a clump of grass. She closes her eyes, her hand falls from her knee, she moves her leg to stand up, pressing the ground with her heel.
The journey begins. In the short trip that separates her from the point where she glimpsed something, an atlas of gestures and expressions accompanies her movement: from dawn to sunset, each gesture is transmitted to the next, each passage finds different details of the infinite in the field of grass, revealing humanity in dialogue with nature, where the human quality of gesture regenerates by listening to weeds, the earth, each discovering the other. Shot in Florence, in Quartiere 4 / Legnaia - Isolotto.

With: Thomas Baba, Elisabetta Baglioni, Lino Bandini, Vanna Bartolozzi, Paolo Basetti, Adele Battaglia, Simone Bellucci, Mario Bencivenni, Dina Berni, Shirin Bieri, Sonia Bieri, Riccardo Campani, Marco Cappelli, Gregorio Ceccarelli,  Otello Cecchi, Alessandra Ciotti, Claudia Dauru, Maurizio Dolfi, Maura Elcaras Falkenberg, Sergio Elisei, Daniela Erbabianca, Anita Fabbri, Valentina Ferrari, Graziano Giachi, Isabel Leao, Alma Augusta Lippi, Dagmar Lorenz, Angelina Mirashi, Cecilia Muti, Elhadji Ndiaye, Rachele Noferini, Annalisa Panizza, Fiorenza Raffagli, Anna Revedin, Giulia Ricci, Sara Severini, Fosco Sieni, Matilde Sieni, Lorenzo Sieni, Anna Stefani, Hortencia Teran, Chiara Tesi, Ilaria Tocchi, Benjamin Yeboah. 

Virgilio Sieni
Founded the Butterfly Park Company in 1983, and the Virgilio Sieni Company in 1992. He has created shows for important Italian musical institutions and has won many awards (Ubu, Dance & Dance, The Stranger, Anct). In 2013, he became director of the Venice Biennale - Dance Sector and was nominated Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et de lettres by the French Minister of Culture. Represented Italy at Marseille European Capital of Culture 2013, also in Brussels, during the Italian Semester of the Presidency of the European Union 2014. He teaches at the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture since 2016; in the same year he started the project Arte del gesto nel Mediterraneo - Accademia sui linguaggi del corpo e l’opera dei pupi, in collaboration with the City of Palermo and Mimmo Cuticchio, creating an unprecedented course that investigates the relationship between dance and puppet theater. 


Selected Filmography
He realised videos documenting more than 120 creations, between shows and artistic projects.

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