Cronorama

This film was made during the Kino Guarimba 2022, a residency that every year brings together fifty artists from all over the world to make short films in the city of Amantea in Calabria. The one I had the honour to attend was a special edition because it hosted ten people from Ukraine. I found myself discussing what was happening in their country.

As a person who watches many movies, ‘war’ has always fascinated and destabilized me at the same time because the more I think about it, the more it becomes an inconceivable event for me outside of fictionalization. It can be said that war is its ‘image’, few have had direct experience of it and for many it resounds like a distant echo on television screens, almost as if it were a science fiction or a sort of another reality. Daria and Mykola, the two leading actors, told me about what was happening in Kyev and I could not imagine the reality of these facts, I did not realize that these words were not ‘stories’ but ‘testimonies’. And all this took place in a quiet seaside resort that gave an atmosphere of suspension and alienation, as if we were in the safest place on earth.

I am not calling this small work ‘political’, because in my mind it is something completely abstract, but I think it reflects the stories of the people who worked on it: mine, those of the two protagonists, but also those of Anita (sound engineer), Jane and Kateryna (photography directors), also from Kyev. Rewatching the film, I can say that it speaks about the impossibility or difficulty of conceiving this senseless amalgam of violence that surrounds us, even though it remains imperceptible and unexpectable to the vast majority of us.