Private Project

memorie involontarie/unintentional memory

Departing from Walter Benjamin’s texts around the concept of immemory (eingedenken), the film examines the memory as a projector loop, a form which is editable, translatable and that can be deceitful.

Revolving around the idea that family haunts you, and constitutes an archeology that can be irrational, fragmented, and unfaithful, the movie practices a re-writing and re-signification of spaces, using a visual exploration of personal places in the form of a geographical archive. The intention is to see what context tells us about the construction of a trauma.

In this sense it’s both a poetic investigation on the possibility of re-mapping the past to conjure different possibilities in the present and a research into the disruptive political and other-worldly possibility of films to open up new ways of investigating the future.

  • Esther Fantuzzi
    Director
  • Esther Fantuzzi
    Writer
  • Esther Fantuzzi
    Producer
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    14 minutes 11 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    June 9, 2023
  • Country of Origin:
    Italy
  • Country of Filming:
    Italy
  • Language:
    Italian
  • Shooting Format:
    16mm
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Black & White and Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    Yes - Luca School of Art
Director Biography - Esther Fantuzzi

Esther Fantuzzi, is an Italian filmmaker and visual artist, whose work recomposes movies which are continuously manipulated during processing and live projections. Her research revolves around the investigation of how the use of analog instruments determines a different proposition on cinematic language in the present.

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Director Statement

The movie, shot in 16mm film format, develops as a projector loop, a form which is editable, translatable and that can be deceitful. Rather than showing the subjects of the events, the film displays an expanded landscape which revolves around the voices which are presented, manifesting the idea that family haunts you and how reconstructing that bond consists of operating a series of real and evocative reassessments of personal history.

The movie shapes itself through audio recordings of author’s grandmother, great-aunt, cousins and parents, elaborating social status, addictions, work, different upbringing, and losses; supported by a text which is both a reflection on fading and unfaithful memory, and a proposal on how we can redraw our past and how it can be re-written.
The resulting film is about the social and political structures of a given place at a given time, combining moving images with landscape theory, creating a new occult map of affectivity, an intuition, a loop and an interference. Addressing both Walter Benjamin’s texts around the concept of immemory (eingedenken) as well as different kinds of minor knowledge, built of plural, underground and fiercely subjective voices. Repurpose frames of reference as tools to unearth the folds of the past, it’s an effort to draw new possibilities, an attempt of imagination, of conjuring the past, expecting to address a collective archive.

A plea from the future, which is an occasion to investigate our personal relation to loss and perhaps a form of collective mourning. A map of intimacy, a movie both incidental, and necessarily partial on the ghosts of our past and this land we share.