ANAMARIA MARINCA
BOOTSTRAPPED – “ Grandpa’s Paradox”
by Tony Grissoni, in Essex Road at TINTYPE Gallery
The bootstrap paradox refers to scenarios whereby items or information are passed from the future to the past, which in turn then sent back to the same point in time again (either the original or a copy). This creates a circularity of cause-effect or a reductive causal loop such that the items or information have no discernible origin. The paradox raises the ontological questions of where, when and by whom the items were created or the information derived.
Tony Grisoni is a BAFTA winning screenwriter whose credits include In This World, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Red Riding and Southcliffe.
DOMINIQUE GREEN
THE TRUCE (1997, Francesco Rosi)
A few scenes from Francesco Rosi’s last work The truce, based on Primo Levi’s memoir (1963) will be screened during the Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival. It describes Primo Levi’s experiences returning from the concentration camp at Auschwitz after the Second World War, a journey he makes in the company of other Italian former prisoners of war, which will take him back to Turin, his hometown. A long and dangerous journey during which the people need to become accustomed with the idea of being free again. A journey full of hope and desperation, because the war is indeed over, but it will always live in the survivors’ hearts, a traumatic experience which can never be forgotten, something that needs to be told to future generations so that such a horror may not repeat itself.
It is indeed a must to commemorate director Francesco Rosi, a man and film director who brought onto the big screen the uncomfortable truths of his own country thanks to his moral severity and his ability to bring up urgent social issues.
ISABELLE MAYOR
AMIRA
Isabelle Mayor, France/Switzerland, 2014, 18’
Amira, a seventeen-year-old student butcher, tries to master her desire for her classmate Benji. In order to find out how he feels, she asks him to sacrifice a lamb with her in accordance with Muslim ritual.
It is the director herself that talks about her film: “Amira is a girl of Maghrebi origins, who works as an apprentice in a butcher’s shop, a rather unusual and unpleasant place. She is therefore part of a stigmatized context. In spite of these apparent social cliché, she is a very clever, happy and lively girl who asks herself questions of universal importance. The idea was to create a character anyone could identify himself with. Who has never asked himself at least once: “Would I be able to kill an animal to eat it”? Anyway, it was not my intention to produce a militant or intellectual film, rather to suggest more abstract themes through the simplicity of a love story, which lays bare the fragility of adolescence”.
