Couscous

Dealing with my own history and the cultural and geographic legacy of Tripoli, Libya and Rome, Italy, my work stems from my family’s story.
Oreste, my father, was born in Tripoli in 1939, into a Maltese family who had settled there in the ‘700 during the Ottoman Empire.
In 1969 though, right after Muammar al-Gaddafi’s coup, all the Europeans living in Libya had to flee the country and were banned from returning to it, an unusual case of reversed migration.

On the right side of a split screen appears an assembly of family footage shot in Tripoli in the early ‘60s, over which my father’s voice explains his couscous recipe in Italian. While he talks about the recipe, an English text appears on the left side of the screen. This text is not the translation into English of my father’s recipe, but rather a sort of emotional decoding of it. Using an imaginary dictionary, I translate his culinary love into a different conversation.
The Italian voice over serves as a sort of musical score to convey passion. It might as well be in Arabic or any other language and it is not meant to be translated or subtitled.

  • Marina Sagona
    Director
  • Marina Sagona
    Writer
  • Dado Carillo
    Producer
  • Marina Sagona
    Producer
  • Oreste Sagona
    Key Cast
    "himself"
  • Letteria Trapani
    Key Cast
    "herself"
  • Baldassarre Sagona
    Key Cast
    "himself"
  • Angelo Mirabelli
    Key Cast
    "himself"
  • Wilma Sagona
    Key Cast
    "herself"
  • Angelo Sagona
    Key Cast
    "himself"
  • Francesca Trapani
    Key Cast
  • Angelo Mirabelli
    Cinematography
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    6 minutes 17 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    November 5, 2020
  • Production Budget:
    500 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    Libya
  • Language:
    Italian
  • Shooting Format:
    8 mm transferred into digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Prague International Indie Film Festival
    Prague
    September 18, 2021
    Premiere
    Official Selection
  • London Rocks Film Festival
    London
    November 5, 2022
    Official selection
  • On Art - Poland
    Warsaw
    Poland
    July 3, 2022
    Official Selection
Director Biography - Marina Sagona

Marina Sagona (b. 1967) is an Italian and American multimedia conceptual artist. Her upcoming exhibition Stabat Mater at Chiquita Room Gallery will take place within the frame of the Loop Festival in Barcelona in November 2023. Sagona has diverse experiences in the arts. Early in her career, she studied Art History at the University La Sapienza in Rome and was the postmodern artist Mario Schifano’s studio assistant. After arriving in New York in 1995, she illustrated for The New Yorker and the New York Times. From 2006 to 2008, she directed the Contemporary Department of the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture (FIAC). Her curatorial practice includes a collaboration with Alanna Heiss on the exhibition “Senso Unico” at MoMA PS1 in 2008 and the exhibition “Dante Ferretti: Design and Construction for the Cinema” at MoMA in 2014. Sagona is also the recipient of the 2017 Strategic 50 Award, the 2019 Domus Artist Residency in Galatina, Italy, and the 2021 Chiquita Gallery Residency in Barcelona, Spain. Stabat Mater won the Cadence Video Poetry Festival award in the category of Video Poetry by an Artist, the Best Script/Concept Award at Ribalta Experimental Film Festival and Best Experimental Film Award at Sipontum Arthouse International Film festival.

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