TOPOLINO – A Globetrotter's Fairy Tale

Topolino is lost, lonesome and nostalgic, wandering around the globe. On his journey to extraordinary places, in a desperate search for the myths that surround them, he entangles himself in endless failures and encounters first of all himself and cultural stereotypes.

The soundtrack of the performance-based silent film is to be produced by live musicians during viewing/screening, or by the viewer from the favourite music library.

Shot at Mount Sodom, Negev Desert and Dead Sea, Israel (2009); Bosporus, Turkey (2009); River Arno/Tuscany, Italy (2009); Chinese Wall/Beijing Region, China (2009), Glacier Perito Moreno, Argentina (2010); Antarctica (2012).

  • VestAndPage
    Director
  • VestAndPage
    Writer
  • VestAndPage
    Producer
  • VestAndPage
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Feature, Other
  • Genres:
    Experimental, Documentary, Mockary, Performance art, Travel, Stereotype, Culture
  • Runtime:
    58 minutes 43 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    November 11, 2014
  • Country of Origin:
    Germany
  • Country of Filming:
    Antarctica, Argentina, China, Israel, Italy
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • LOGE Galerie
    Berlin
    Germany
  • Visioni Acustiche @ MACRO Testaccio
    Rome
    Italy
Director Biography - VestAndPage

Since 2006, German artist Verena Stenke and Venetian-born artist and writer Andrea Pagnes have been working together as VestAndPage and gained international recognition in the fields of performance art, performance-based film, writing, publishing, and collective performance operas and temporary artistic community projects. For over a decade, VestAndPage have been exploring performance art and film as a phenomenon through their collaborative creative practice, as well as through theoretical artistic research and curatorial projects. Their works have been presented in museums, galleries, theatres, cinemas and a variety of sites worldwide. They are devoted to a poetic approach in experimental, personal filmmaking based on performance art, questioning the perception of reality, and how we process and store information. For VestAndPage, film can delude space-time, open the unconscious as a creative vessel, and reveal processes and relations by linking apparently disconnected persons, things and happenings.

Between 2010 and 2012 they produced their trilogy of performance-based short films "sin∞fin" in Antarctica, Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and India. Between 2014 and 2018, VestAndPage produced "Plantain", an award-winning art film based on their month-long performance walk from Northern Germany through Poland to the Russian region of Kaliningrad in May/June 2015. The project is based on true historic events of the escape of Stenke's family in the civil exodus from former East Prussia in winter 1945. In 2020 they published "Poetics of Relations – A Manifesto On Performance-Based Filmmaking" as a video article inquiring their practice on the Journal of Embodied Research. The same year saw them producing "ANAM CARA – Mirror in the Mirror" through co-creation in lockdown with 22 international performance artists, as well as "AMOR AND PSYCHE (In Times of Plagues)", a short about the nature of breath.
They are currently in post-production for their performance-based feature "STRATA" on Deep Time, realized in collaboration with over 20 artists and scientists in the caves of the Swabian Jura. They are developing "momentum", a series of video conversations on existential subjects with people from the arts, culture and science.
They have authored and produced numerous other video art works and experimental shorts based on performance art.

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