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Look back Anouk

This short film directed by young directors Rocco Gurrieri and Irene Montini and produced by Salvatore Ferragamo draws its inspiration from the figurative world of the scarves created by Fulvia Ferragamo as well as from animated films by Czechoslovakian director Jiří Trnka, whose patchwork flower puppets suggested the figurative style of early Ferragamo prints. A lonely girl in a palace suspended between sky and sea slips tenderly into the emptiness of her days, secretly composing a variety of fantastical worlds in which she may abandon herself to her fantasies. Look Back Anouk is not just a title, it is an invitation to both the protagonist and the audiences to look back, recognize themselves and welcome the gentle, crystalline irrationality of childhood. Human and animal characters are the ones who drag us on these unusual journeys with a melancholic taste. Curious and a little lost they swim among the pages of strange stories, catapulted perhaps by mistake into the upside of reality, where dreams rest. The visions and sensations that torment Anouk making her predict the arrival of something mysterious and unknowable, they are nothing more than messengers and heralds in celebration, anxious for the vibrant ritual that is celebrated among the flowers of the forest. A magical and audacious strength is really revealed to her. Once the night is over, the dances are silenced and the fears are extinguished, all that remains is to to rock and shine with life, “Like tears, crying for their own shame”.

  • Rocco Gurrieri
    Director
  • Irene Montini
    Director
  • Rocco Gurrieri
    Writer
  • Salvatore Ferragamo s.p.a
    Producer
    "Life in Technicolor" directed by Luca Guadagnino
  • Anouk Borgman
    Key Cast
    "Anouk"
  • Giacomo Mottola
    Original Music
  • Susanna Bertuccioli
    Original Music
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Genres:
    fantasy
  • Runtime:
    9 minutes 10 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    March 1, 2021
  • Production Budget:
    10,000 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    Italy
  • Country of Filming:
    Italy
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Firenze
    Italy
    March 25, 2021
    Museo Salvatore Ferragamo
Distribution Information
  • Salvatore Ferragamo s.p.a
    Distributor
    Country: Italy
Director Biography - Rocco Gurrieri, Irene Montini

Irene Montini and Rocco Gurrieri are a duo of italian directors. They have been working together since 2017 on publishing fashion films, experimental and animated films, fashion editorials. Irene has a degree in photography, while Rocco comes from a background as assistant in movie production companies. They have made fashion films and publishing features for “Vice”, “I-d”, “Schön magazine”, “La Repubblica”, “Art Tribune”, “La Nazione”, “Contributor magazine”, “Dazed Beauty”, “Sleek magazine”, “Infringe Magazine”, “Pap magazine”, “WRPD magazine”, Luisa via Roma, Nike, Reebok. After directing the documentary Sustainable Thinking in 2019 for the Salvatore Ferragamo Museum and shot the photos for the catalogue bearing the same name, they prepare their first personal video and art exhibition Incanto at museo Novecento in Florence. In 2021 they direct the short film “Look back Anouk”, produced by Salvatore Ferragamo.
The colourful sets, filled with detail and very conspicuous styling play with savage irony on the theme of inner turmoil, suspended between love and death, evoking an oneiric sensory overload. The fascination for mystery is confirmed as the force that moves their production, with a special research and attention to the cinematographic language.

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Director Statement

Look Back Anouk is a story studded with references to the universe of Fulvia Ferragamo’s scarves, which we transformed into landscapes/backdrops and companions as this anomalous story cryptically unfolds. A fairy tale shot in live action and stop motion, divided into three acts, two dreams and an awakening, the film tells the story of a modern-day girl undoubtedly similar in subtle ways to Lewis Carroll’s Alice, starting with the undeniable ambiguity of being both victim and accomplice of the bizarre events that take place. At the beginning, Anouk’s thoughts lead us into the world of contradictions in which she finds herself, in which every single thing takes on a mysterious, seemingly meaningless connotation: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was” (William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, c. 1595). Here, the sense of a lack of “physical” rules—and the bewilderment that ensues—is analogous to the poetics linking Arnold Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead (1880–86) series of five paintings, which the Swiss painter defined as “pictures for dreaming,” in the folds of which each viewer could locate his or her own meaning and personal abandonment.
In the diegesis of the tale, the swamp where Anouk initially finds herself does not represent a landscape but, rather, a non-place, a stage for the unconscious, a space for the mystery of the not visible. It is appropriate here to quote symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé: “To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the enjoyment of the poem, which is made up of the joy of gradual discovery. Suggest it—that is the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the symbol.” What the film seems to suggest is indeed an enigma, a vortex of questions that, despite everything, prompt their own answer.