Story for an Empty Theatre (2016)

This film narrates an intense story of love, disease and death, inspired by the autobiographical novel "Beyond the Blue", by the Italian photographer and writer Cesare Bedognè. The novel is at the basis of the theatrical performance/concert of the same name which, together with the writer's photographs, was the first material on which this film was created. In this work, still photographs, diary fragments and poems from the book merge cinematographically, through the editing by Aleksandr Balagura, with shots improvised during the performance and other shots taken both in a deserted Sanatorium of the Italian Alps, the place of the writer's past, and on the Greek island of Lesvos, the place of his present. As the book on which it is based, the film wanders freely in time, being more faithful to the intrinsically diachronic and poetic flow of memory rather than to the artificial linearity of conventional narration. The space of this film is thus the space of consciousness, a continuum which dilates, in one of the very last shots into a dreamlike meditation on death, when the theatre's stage slowly dissolves into the interior of a ruined church, and the white female figure that connects as a thread the various shots of the film, splits and leaves the scene. Only a wandering plastic bag remains, before the broken altar, carried by the wind. Through this filmic journey, reminiscent at times of expressionist language, and even of Melies' tricks and magic, we are also led to the very depths of the photographic image, the stuff cinema is made of. Gelatin silver pictures merge in this film with cinematic shots, abandoning their seemingly static form, as if still under the action of a developer in the darkroom, gradually revealing different layers of reality. The same pictures return rhythmically, in the film, and as the story unfolds they produce new suggestions and meaning, in the continuously renewed flow of memory. In quite a similar manner, the actress seems to react to both words and Bach's music, wandering at will inside and outside the stage, opening up to both natural elements and crumbling rooms, echoing the everlasting voice of the sea.