Lo schermo dell'arte 2024, 17ª edizione

Lo schermo dell’arte 17th edition

Festival di cinema e arte contemporanea

Florence, November 13 – 17, 2024

Cinema La Compagnia, Palazzo Strozzi, NYU Florence , Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze

Streaming: Lo schermo dell’arte channel on MYmovies ONE
November 13 – 24, 2024

Free admission for those under 30

Focus on Garrett Bradley

The 17th edition’s Focus is dedicated to American artist, educator, and filmmaker Garrett Bradley. In 2020, Bradley presented her debut feature-length documentary, Time, which was nominated for more than fifty awards—including an Oscar—and won twenty, including the 2020 Peabody Award and the Best Director Award in the US Documentary Competition category at that year’s Sundance Film Festival, making her the first Black woman to win the award in the history of the festival. Bradley was a 2015 resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and is a recipient of the Prix de Rome (2019), the Arts and Letters Award for Art by the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2022), and the Eye Filmmuseum’s Eye Art & Film Prize (2023). Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2019); the Momentary, Crystal Bridges, Arkansas (2021); the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Pittsburgh (2022); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2022). Bradley’s recent book Devotion, released in February 2024, was the first in a series of research-led publications on artists by MIT Press and Lisson Gallery.

Opening night: mercoledì 13 novembre

Opening Night with the performance Edge of Life (2024) by John Menick, in which the American artist and filmmaker talks with a sentient computer about the possibility of digital immortality. A sort of reverse Turing Test: the computer interrogates the artist for purposes that may or may not include the cloning of his consciousness. Through a narrated text and a montage of science fiction images, computer graphics, films from the history of cinema, biological and folkloric research, Edge of Life is a strange investigation into how the digital transforms the boundaries of the living.
Following Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2024), by Haitian director Raoul Peck, Oscar nominee for I’m Not Your Negro (2016). It depicts the story of the South African photographer forced into exile in New York after the publication of his book House of Bondage (1967), a brave denunciation of the horrors of apartheid. The film reconstructs his life, also thanks to the discovery, in 2017, of 60,000 negatives considered lost, images that intensely capture the brutality of racial segregation in South Africa and the United States. The film won the Œil d’or for Best Documentary at the Cannes Film Festival.

Special event exergue - on documenta 14

The Italian premiere of exergue – on documenta 14 by Greek filmmaker Dimitris Athridis is a special event of the Festival’s 17th edition. This thriller documentary, with an extraordinary runtime of 14 hours, is an unprecedented behind-the-scenes exploration of one of the most important contemporary exhibitions in the world. Athiridis spent two years documenting the preparation of documenta 14, filming the meetings and site visits of artistic director Adam Szymczyk and his curatorial team. For the first time, this edition of documenta 14 was held not only in Kassel but also in Athens Szymczyk’s curatorial and political choices led to a financial deficit followed by a media scandal, overshadowing the artistic merits of the exhibition. Composed of 14 chapters of approximately one hour each, it will be presented at Palazzo Strozzi, in the Strozzina spaces, in collaboration with Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, throughout the duration of the Festival. Adam Szymczyk will have a conversation with Salvatore Lacagnina, curator and co-creator of the Studio14 programme for Athens documenta 14.

VISIO 2024

VISIO – European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images, curated by Leonardo Bigazzi and dedicated to artists under 35 who use moving images, reaches its 13th edition this year. It confirms its support for the production of new works by young artists through the VISIO Production Fund, worth €35,000 and financed in partnership with Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato), Fondazione In Between Art Film (Rome) and FRAC Bretagne (Rennes).
Thanks to the support of Human Company, a historic company and a leading name in openair hospitality in Italy, the VISIO Production Fund 2024 has been increased by €5,000 and, for the first time, will include a reimbursement for the travel expenses of participating artists.

This year, 153 applications (+20%) were received from 53 different countries (+18%).
The Festival will feature the artists who won the VISIO Production Fund 2023: Andro Eradze, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, and Valentin Noujaïm.
The film Razeh-del (2024) by Iranian artist Maryam Tafakory, produced with the Visio Production Fund 2022, will have its Italian premiere at the festival.

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After Colossus
by Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, 2024
World premiere
Realized with the support of VISIO Production Fund
The reconstruction, blending fiction and reality, of a mysterious secret project run by the Indonesian army that began after the collapse of Soeharto’s authoritarian regime in 1999, in which children from rural areas were kidnapped, subjected to dreamlike experiments, and indoctrinated.

AKA
by Garrett Bradley, 2019
Italian premiere
AKA, the first in a trilogy about women’s relationships, focuses on mothers and daughters in mixed-race families or those with varying skin tones. Garrett Bradley’s experimental short arose from conversations with her female protagonists, exploring race, upward mobility, and relationships between white and Black women. The term “color struck” shapes the film’s prismatic effects, contributing to its dream-like atmosphere. These dialogues influenced the film’s choreography and locations, reflecting the visions of its subjects.

Alone
by Garrett Bradley, 2017
Italian premiere
In installations, shorts, and feature-length works, Bradley consistently locates her subjects in particular places frequently in her home city of New Orleans that become sites of a confrontation between personal narratives and larger historical and political ones. In her nonfiction work, Alone, a portrait of a single mother in New Orleans whose partner has been incarcerated in a facility that forbids in-person visits, Bradley disrupts the conventional hierarchies of observational documentary, positioning herself as confidant, advocate, and accomplice.

Alreadymade
by Barbara Visser, 2023
Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, considered one of the most influential artworks of the 20th century, was first shown at an exhibition by the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. The film investigates the theories attributing it to the Dada artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927).

Among the Palms, the Bomb, or: Looking for Reflections in the Toxic Field of Plenty by Lukas Marxt and Vanja Smiljanic, 2024
World premiere
In the Salton Sea, south of California, the water level has dropped by half a meter and is destined to dry up. But this is also the place where the United States tested numerous atomic bombs during World War II in anticipation of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and during the Cold War.

Art of Diplomacy
by Zeca Brito, 2023
European premiere
At the Royal Academy in London in 1944, during the bombings of World War II, the art of the Brazilian modernist movement was presented to the world for the first time. The film narrates the story of a gesture of cultural diplomacy forgotten for decades. The proceeds from the sales of the exhibited works were donated by the artists themselves to the Royal Air Force as their contribution to supporting the fight against Nazism and Fascism.

Arte Povera, Appunti per la Storia
by Andrea Bettinetti, 2023
A film about the subversive power of a movement and a group of young artists who profoundly influenced the contemporary art scene, not just in Italy. Featuring iconic masterpieces, original footage from the period, and interviews with its key figures, the film presents an incredible account of Arte Povera and its innovative language.

Club Bunker
by M+M (Weis/De Mattia), 2023
Italian premiere
The duo M+M returns to Lo schermo dell’arte with the second episode of a trilogy featuring praying mantises as its protagonists. They move in a perfectly reconstructed miniature environment blending the architecture of a bunker with that of a club, where a looming danger resonates, though its nature remains unknown.

Con i denti tra i coltelli
by Roberto Fassone, 2024
World premiere
An amateur basketball team from Florence is seen through the lens of one of its players, the artist Roberto Fassone. The life of the group, encompassing practices, games, and locker rooms, is interspersed with materials sourced from the internet. A blend of the author’s love poetry towards his friends, diary and mixtape, the film shows the joys and dramas of personal and collective daily life.

Daphne Was a Torso Ending in Leaves
by Catriona Gallagher, 2024
Italian premiere
Daphne, who was transformed into a laurel tree, is celebrated here as a heroine and the author of her own destiny. In the film, shot in a contemporary Rome rich in references to the tree-woman, the representation of the myth becomes the very essence of the film, which the artist subjects to a development process using an infusion of laurel.

Duck
by Rachel Maclean, 2024
Italian premiere
Through deepfake images and audio, the artist who plays all the characters, swaps her voice and face with those of Marilyn Monroe and Sean Connery, brought to the screen via artificial intelligence. Sean Connery, as James Bond, gathers clues, disorients the attackers, and attempts to eliminate the femme fatale Marilyn Monroe, only to ultimately uncover that nothing is as it appears.

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
by Raoul Peck, 2024
South African photographer Ernest Cole was the first artist to courageously expose the horrors of apartheid. Raoul Peck recounts the challenges Cole faced, both as an artist and as a Black man, in a deeply racist world, starting from the discovery in 2017 of 60,000 missing negatives in a bank vault in Sweden.

exergue – on documenta 14
by Dimitris Athiridis, 2024
Italian premiere
Almost a thriller, the film with an extraordinary 14-hour duration is an unprecedented exploration behind the scenes of the institutional world of contemporary art. Dimitris Athiridis spent two years documenting the preparation of documenta 14, capturing the meetings and site visits of artistic director Adam Szymczyk and his curatorial team.

Flowering and Fading
by Andro Eradze, 2024
World premiere
Realized with the support of VISIO Production Fund
Drawing on surrealism and magical realism, Eradze’s practice resonates in revealing an alien sense of otherness through narratives introduced in the outskirts of human habitation. Gathering winds echo through the shadowiness of a still and quiet house. The night envelops a dog and human asleep when a sudden gust knocks over a jar of honey. The boundaries between the imaginative and the real begin to blur.

La Gola
by Diego Marcon, 2024
An epistolary tale between two hyper-realistic digitally animated dolls that innovatively explores the visual storytelling of melodrama. Through a series of letters, Gianni tells Rossana about the dishes his chef friend is preparing for him. In her responses, Rossana, while caring for her sick mother, informs Gianni about her mother’s worsening condition.

Lolo & Sosaku’ The Western Archive
by Sergio Caballero, 2024
Italian premiere
A surreal narrative without dialogue that revisits the Western genre, blending fiction, documentary, and artist cinema. Caballero explores the universe of Lolo & Sosaku, a duo of sound artists who create installations of sound sculptures using a combination of self-made instruments, small rotating robots made of wood and metal, wires, pistons, tape, and nails, pushing the automatism of art to new extremes.

Mangrovia
by Low Jack e Invernomuto, 2024
Italian premiere
The film is shot in Martinique between land and sea, in the heart of the mangrove tropical forest. Dancer and choreographer Rayna, a leading figure in the dancehall movement of the French West Indies, moves through the marshy landscapes performing the head top, a dance move in which she balances on the top of her head. Her stiff body collapses to the ground, establishing a dialogue with the surrounding natural elements.

Naomi Osaka: Rise
by Garrett Bradley, 2021
The first of three episodes of the Netflix docuseries, it offers an intimate look at the life of Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka, the highest-paid female athlete in the world, who won four Grand Slam titles by the age of 23. Far from the rhetoric of traditional sports films, Bradley presents Osaka both in moments of success and in more opaque and complex times, highlighting her honesty and her reflections on profound themes such as identity and gender politics.

Radical Women
by Isabel Nascimento Silva, 2023
Italian premiere
In 2017, the exhibition Radical Women at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles was the first survey of the radical and feminist practices of women artists in Latin America and Latinx artists in the United States, who created pivotal works between the 1960s and 1980s. Eleven of them come together in the film to discuss their work, opening a new chapter in the history of 20th-century art.

Ramallah Old Town 30th April 2024
by Jeremy Deller, 2024
Italian premiere
Shehadeh Shalalda is the only luthier in the city of Ramallah, in the West Bank. To craft his violins, which are now in the hands of many soloists around the world, he sources the finest wood from Italy. However, each return to Ramallah is fraught with challenges due to the mandatory passage through various checkpoints. Deller captures a poetic glimpse of the dramatic daily life amid wartime.

Razeh-del
by Maryam Tafakory, 2024.
Italian premiere
Realized with the support of VISIO Production Fund
Zan (Woman), the first Iranian women’s magazine published briefly in the 1990s under the regime, inspires two young students to write a screenplay for an impossible film. Through the use of saturated colors, whispered sounds and archival images, the film questions the presence of women in Iranian cinema and more broadly in Iranian society.

Safe (Excerpt)
by Garrett Bradley, 2022
Italian premiere
Safe is the second film in a trilogy exploring the overlap between women’s interior and exterior lives. Following AKA (2019), which examined intergenerational relationships, Safe delves into inner worlds, depicting them as vivid and parallel to the outside world. Featuring Donna Crump and Aloné Watts, the film captures the ineffable nature of interior emotions, treating them as a radical space of Black life. The excerpt was screened at a symposium organized by Hilton Als at The Brooklyn Museum.

Sarcophagus of Drunken Loves
by Joana Hadjithomas e Khalil Joreige, 2024
Italian premiere
In Lebanon, power cuts are not an isolated event but a daily reality. The National Museum of Beirut, home to its precious artworks, often faces electricity outages. Nevertheless, visitors remain undeterred and are eager to explore the museum, illuminating the artworks with their phones.

Tempo di viaggio
by Andrej Tarkovskij and Tonino Guerra, 1983
New 4K restoration by the Andrej Tarkovsky International Institute in collaboration with Fixafilm and Polish National Film Archive
Tarkovskij and screenwriter Tonino Guerra embark on a journey to find locations for the film Nostalghia. The film takes the viewer on a discovery of the creative process of a great master of cinema and his relationship with his collaborator and friend. The Tuscan town of Bagno Vignoni, with its thermal bath in the square immersed in an archaic and decadent atmosphere, profoundly impresses the Russian director, becoming not only the central location of this film but also the spiritual symbol in Nostalghia.

The Book of Flowers
by Agnieszka Polska, 2023
Italian premiere
An alternative history of human-plant ecology in which floral species and humans have coexisted in close symbiosis for millennia. The film, combining AI-generated digital animations and 16mm footage in a montage of static and animated sequences of flowers in time-lapse, reflects on the notion of environment as both an organic and social construct.

The Invisible Worm
by Rosalind Nashashibi, 2024
Italian premiere
The film revolves around the friendship between Danish sculptor Marie Lund and Nashashibi herself. While working with different media, the two artists share a similar methodology in conceiving and reflecting on their works. The Invisible Worm is a playful exploration of the myth of the artist and the dynamics of friendship among artists. The title refers to the poem by William Blake, The Sick Rose (1794), in which the poet addresses the rose, warning her that an invisible worm has made her sick.

The Speech
by Lina Lapelytė, 2024
Italian premiere
The Lithuanian artist’s film is a result of her performance, which took place in September 2024 in Paris as part of the Festival d’Automne, hosted at the Bourse de Commerce–Pinault Collection. A group of children and teenagers imitate the sounds of nature through vocalizations that resemble the calls of animals and birds. It serves as a reflection on the failure of language and the disconnect experienced by younger generations, who are increasingly urbanized and distanced from natural environments.

Those Sweet Murky Waters
by Driant Zeneli, 2023
Italian premiere
The ichthyologist Sabiha Kasimati, the first woman scientist in Albania, was arrested by the communist regime in 1951 and executed a few days later without trial, then thrown into a mass grave along with 21 other intellectuals. Through art, memory, ecology, and technology, Zeneli pays tribute to a woman who chose to challenge politics, social stereotypes, and even death in the name of science and freedom.

Time
by Garrett Bradley, 2020
In this intimate yet epic love story filmed over two decades, indomitable matriarch Fox Rich strives to raise her six sons and keep her family together as she fights for her husband’s release from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola. Time which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival was Bradley’s first documentary feature and what the artist calls a “sister film,” to her 2017 short, Alone.

To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion
by Valentin Noujaïm, 2024
Italian premiere
La Défense, the Parisian financial district, is a futuristic labyrinth that traps souls between concrete and glass with its towers and empty promises of liberal prosperity. A businesswoman is designing a new skyscraper. The gray, cold workplace amplifies her loneliness, pushing her to the brink of collapse. The office becomes a prison, and the only way out is to set it on fire.

Wolfgang Laib – Here, Now and Far Beyond
by Maria Anna Tappeiner, 2023
Italian premiere
Since his early trips to India in the 1970s, German artist Wolfgang Laib has been influenced by Eastern philosophies that have shaped his artistic practice and worldview. Through the use of a few essential natural materials —pollen, milk, rice, wax— he creates simple installations that blend art, nature, and daily life, inviting meditation on what is truly essential in our frantic and overstimulated era.