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Film Festival
of Villa Medici 2022
14.09 - 18.09.2022
The Villa Medici Film Festival took place from September 14 to 18, 2022 for its second edition!
Since its creation in 2021, the Villa Medici Film Festival has explored the links between cinema and contemporary art. Artists’ films, essays, fiction, documentaries, shorts, medium-length and feature-length films: the festival welcomes a diversity of narratives that question our relationship with images.
The Festival is divided into three sections: International Competition, Focus and Piazzale Evenings.
The International Competition
The International Competition presents twelve recent films of all genres and lengths. At the end of the festival week, two prizes are awarded by the jury at a ceremony attended by the public and artists: the Prix Villa Médicis for Best Film and the Prix du Jury.
Focus
Focus sessions feature screenings of out-of-competition films, as well as encounters. Proposed by the members of the jury, the Cartes blanches are an opportunity to share special moments around films linked to their activities as artists, filmmakers, authors or curators.
The Contrechamp sessions offer a dialogue between films, documentary or fictional, historical or contemporary, notably by Villa Medici artist-filmmakers.
Piazzale Evenings
Alongside the daytime screenings, festival-goers gather every evening on the Piazzale, in front of the historic façade of the Villa Medici, for exceptional open-air screenings of recent films, including previews and restored classics.
The program
SEE YOU FRIDAY, ROBINSON (À VENDREDI, ROBINSON), Mitra Farahani
2022, France, Switzerland, Iran, Lebanon, 97', Color
Rome premiere
The chronicle of a perhaps impossible cinematographic meeting between Ebrahim Golestan and Jean-Luc Godard, two major artists who do not enjoy the same recognition in the West.
DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA, Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor
2022, France, 115', Color
Italian premiere
Today, this film delivers the body to cinema. We discover that human flesh is an unheard-of landscape that exists only thanks to the gazes and attentions of others.
GIGI LA LEGGE, Alessandro Comodin
2022, Italy, France, Belgium, 102', Color
Italian premiere
Gigi is a police officer in a countryside village where nothing ever happens. One day, however, a young girl throws herself under a train. This is not the first time. Faced with this wave of inexplicable suicides, Gigi begins to investigate a strange world, between reality and fantasy.
HAPPER'S COMET, Tyler Taormina
2022, United States, 62', Color
Italian premiere
One night, the neighbourhood life of the Long Island suburbs at the height of lockdown. Nocturnal life comes alive and many residents quietly escape into the darkness...
INTO THE VIOLET BELLY, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
2022, Belgium, Germany, Iceland, Malta, 19', Color
World premiere
The chicken is the disguise of the egg. The chicken exists so that the egg can traverse the ages. That's what a mother is for. The egg lives like a fugitive, always ahead of its time: it is more than contemporary, it belongs to the future.
KICKING THE CLOUDS, Sky Hopinka
2021, United States, 15', Color
Italian premiere
A poetic exploration of the filmmaker's indigenous origin from an audio recording of her grandmother: she tries to learn with her own mother the Pechanga language, already endangered 50 years ago.
THE DAM (LE BARRAGE), Ali Cherri
2022, France, Sudan, Lebanon, Germany, Serbia, Qatar, 80', Color
Italian premiere
Sudan, near the Merowe Dam. Maher works in a brick factory fed by the waters of the Nile. Every evening, he wanders into the desert to build a mysterious earthen building. As the Sudanese people rise up for their freedom, his creation begins to come to life...
IN FIELDS OF WORDS (LE CHAMP DES MOTS), Rania Stephan
2022, Lebanon, 70', Color
World premiere
Can cinema and literature reflect the tragedy of war? Dialoguing with Syrian writer Samar Yazbek, the film weaves visual and sound elements to find meaning in the face of the world's violence.
MANGROVE SCHOOL, Filipa César & Sónia Vaz Borges
2022, France, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, 34', Color
Italian premiere
A lesson learned and then passed on by the filmmakers after studying the living conditions of students in guerrilla schools in the mangroves of Guinea-Bissau: how does it work?
MOUNE Ô, Maxime Jean-Baptiste
2022, French Guiana, France, Belgium, 16', Color
Italian premiere
Through the images of the festivities that accompany the premiere of a film in which the filmmaker's father plays a small role (Jean Galmot aventurier, 1990), Moune Ô reveals the survival of the colonial heritage within a Western collective unconscious.
SAINT OMER, Alice Diop
2021, France, 118', Color
Roman premiere
Rama, a 30-year-old novelist, attends the trial of Laurence Coly, accused of killing her daughter, which will lead her to question the truth of her own experience of motherhood.
THE DEMANDS OF ORDINARY DEVOTION, Eva Giolo
2022, Belgium, 12', Color
Italian premiere
Built from a game of chance and encounters in Rome's workshops and houses, this film invites us to reflect on the manufacturing process, the perspective of motherhood, the uncertainties of creation, balance and composition.
WHEN THERE IS NO MORE MUSIC TO WRITE, AND OTHER ROMAN STORIES, Éric Baudelaire
2022, France, 59', Color
Italian premiere
Three films in one about the figure of avant-garde composer Alvin Curran through his relationship with Rome in the 1960s and 1970s, marked by the kidnapping of politician Aldo Moro and the revolutionary struggle.
XAR, SUEÑO DE OBSIDIANA, Edgar Calel & Fernando Pereira dos Santos
2022 Brazil, 13', Color
Italian premiere
The Kaqchikel Mayan artist Edgar Calel performs a ritual in the pavilion of the São Paulo Biennale in order to make an offering to his ancestors. Between dreams and memories, his spiritual journey leads him to embody his totem animal.
THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE and THE ONTOLOGIC COWBOY, Marie Losier
Carte blanche to Marie Losier
The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye tells the story of the artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and his wife and artistic partner, Lady Jaye, who, out of love, decided to merge into a single entity.
“Theater is about sex.” At least according to Richard Foreman, the father of the Ontological Hysterical Theater. The Ontological Cowboy documents Foreman’s invocation of the “manifest destiny” of the avant-garde theater.
LA BOCCA DEL LUPO, Pietro Marcello
Carte blanche to Pietro Marcello
In Genoa, a man returns home after a long absence and travels through the city looking for the places of the past, which blossom in their former glory in his memory. In the small home in the old city ghetto, his life-long companion has been waiting for him for years.
TOUT-PUISSANT MAMA DJOMBO, Philippe Béziat & Sylvain Prudhomme
Carte blanche to Sylvain Prudhomme
For his carte blanche at the festival, Sylvain Prudhomme premieres the Italian film Super Mama Djombo, the result of his collaboration with French director and screenwriter Philippe Béziat. He takes us on a musical andinitiatory journey in the footstepsof Malan Mané (one of the characters in his book Les Grands), former singer of a flagship group of the years ofIndependence in Guinea-Bissau, exiledin France for 30 years. Once revered in entire stadiums from Dakar to Cuba, the artist returns to his country for the first time.
INFLATION, Hans Richter and THE NEW INFLATION, Liv Schulman
Contrechamp
The first focus compares two works that probe contemporary issues. The first is a performance film shot in Nebraska, The New Inflation (2021). The artist Liv Schulman, Villa Medici Fellow in 2022-23, stages a flow of vignettes around the word "inflation" which echoes the jerky editing style of German filmmaker Hans Richter’s Inflation (1928).
LA VILLA JUMELLE, Yasmina Benabderrahmane, REMNANTS OF THE FUTURE, Uriel Orlow and OFF POWER, Théodora Barat
Contrechamp
The second focus is dedicated to three films by artists who converge around the issue of ruin – past, present and future: Remnants of the Future (2010) by Uriel Orlow, shot in Armenia, is presented alongside two films by Villa Medici Fellows, La Villa Jumelle (2011) by Yasmina Benabderrahmane (Fellow in 2022-23); and Off power (2021) by Théodora Barat (Fellow in 2021-22), shot in Hong Kong.
WELCOME PALERMO, MASBEDO (Nicolò Massazza & Iacopo Bedogni)
Carte blanche to the Fondazione In Between Art Film
The In Between Art Film Foundation invites the MASBEDO duo to present their film Welcome Palermo, on the initiative of curator Leonardo Bigazzi, who is also a member of the selection committee for the Villa Medici 2022 Film Festival.
LA MONTAGNE, Thomas Salvador
2022, France, 115', Color
Pierre, a Parisian engineer, travels to the Alps for work. Irresistibly attracted by the mountains, he sets up a bivouac at altitude and decides never to come down again. Up there, he meets Léa and discovers a mysterious glow.
LES ENFANTS DES AUTRES, Rebecca Zlotowski
2022, France, 104', Color
Rachel is 40 and loves her life: her high school students, her friends, her exes, her guitar lessons. As she falls in love with Ali, she becomes attached to Leila, her 4-year-old daughter. She tucks her in, cares for her and loves her as her own. But loving other people's children is a risk she has to take.
PADRE PIO, Abel Ferrara
2022, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, 104', Color
It's the end of the First World War, and the young Italian soldiers return to San Giovanni Rotondo, a poor land over which the Church and wealthy landowners exercise unchallenged domination. Padre Pio also arrives to begin his ministry. The eve of Italy's first free elections is the prelude to a massacre that will change the course of history.
STELLA IS IN LOVE, Sylvie Verheyde
2022, France, 110', Color
For Stella, it's graduation year. But she says she doesn't care about that. What she discovers that year is the Bains Douches, the 1980s, Paris and its wild nights. Her girlfriends are just studying, her father has gone off with another woman and her mother is depressed. And then there's André, dancing like a god. That year would decide his whole life.
SCIUSCIÀ, Vittorio De Sica
1946, Italy, 87', b/w
Rome, 1945. Pasquale and Giuseppe are two young boys bound by a sincere friendship who, in the turmoil of the post-war period, indulge in lucrative if not entirely legal activities. Implicated in a burglary, they are sent to reform school to await trial. Their life in the reformatory becomes increasingly painful, until their friendship is shattered. Sciuscià, a masterpiece of Italian neo-realism and winner of the 1947 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, is presented for the first time in Rome in its restored version.
Prize list
The jury awarded two prizes: the Prix Villa Médicis for Best Film and the Prix du Jury for a singular film that caught the jurors’ attention. These prizes, worth 5,000 euros and 3,000 euros respectively, also offer filmmakers the opportunity of a residency at Villa Medici.
VILLA MEDICIS PRIZE FOR BEST FILM "In fields of words" ("Le champ des mots") by Rania Stephan
“For the power of the object; the charisma, the commitment, the sometimes raw sincerity of the character and of the evocation of exile; the love between the director and the extraordinary woman she films; the strength of the testimony that this film represents and all that it makes us understand about the difficulty and exhaustion of bearing witness; the emotion of Samar Yazbek's words and this portrait that gives meaning to the gesture of continuing to create, we are happy to award the Prize for Best Film to Rania Stephan for her film IN FIELDS OF WORDS.”
The 2022 Jury
JURY PRIZE "Gigi la legge" by Alessandro Comodin
“For the delicacy, humor and generosity; the elegance and grace of the direction; the beauty and tranquility of the character; the gentle madness of the embodiment of the law, and to send all our wishes to this man we would like to meet every day, we award the Jury Prize to Alessandro Comodin for GIGI LA LEGGE.”
The 2022 Jury
Marie Losier
Marie Losier is a film director and producer born in 1972 in Boulogne-Billancourt (France). After 20 years working in New York, she is now based in Paris. She produces avant-garde, intimate and poetic portraits of filmmakers, musicians and artists such as Alan Vega, the Kuchar brothers, Guy Maddin, Richard Foreman, Tony Conrad and April March. Her work has been presented at the Cannes Film Festival, the Berlinale, the Tate Modern, MoMA, Palais de Tokyo, the Pompidou Centre, the Whitney Museum, Jeu de Paume, the Pernod Ricard Foundation, the Cinémathèque Française and the Greek Film Archive. In 2013, she received the DAAD Residency Award and the Guggenheim Award for her documentary film Cassandro the Exotico! about queer Mexican wrestler Saúl Armendáriz. Marie Losier is currently working on three projects that combine cinema, music and contemporary art: a portrait of singer Peaches in the Berlin Underground of the 2000s, and another of the American group The Residents (Behind The Mask), as well as a musical. In 2023, her work will be exhibited at the Anne Barrault Gallery in Paris and the MAC VAL Contemporary Art Museum in Val-de-Marne. A solo exhibition will open at the Musée Transpalette in Bourges, and she will be in residence at Villa Albertine.
Pietro Marcello
Pietro Marcello is an Italian film director born in Caserta in 1976. His first feature film, Il Passaggio della linea, a documentary shot at night on Italian express trains, was presented in 2007 at the Venice Film Festival in the Orizzonti section and won numerous awards when it was released. In 2009, he directed the dramatic documentary La Bocca del Lupo, which won the prize for best film at the 27th Turin Film Festival, the Caligari Prize, and the Teddy Award at the Berlinale. In 2011, he shot Il Silenzio di Pelešjan, presented at the 68th Venice Film Festival, while in 2015, his film Bella e perduta was presented at the Locarno Festival.
In 2019, he directed Martin Eden – based on Jack London’s novel – which received numerous awards and for which the actor Luca Marinelli won the Volpi Cup for best male performance at the Venice Film Festival. In 2021, Pietro Marcello directed the documentary Per Lucio about Italian singer-songwriter Lucio Dalla, shown in the special Berlinale section of the 71st Berlin Film Festival. That same year, at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, he presented the film Futura, co-directed with Francesco Munzi and Alice Rohrwacher. In 2022, his latest film Scarlet (Le Vele scarlatte) also premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight.
Sylvain Prudhomme
Sylvain Prudhomme was born in 1979 in La Seyne-sur-Mer (France). An author of novels and reportage, he received the Femina prize in 2019 for his novel Par les routes (published by Gallimard). His work draws on lived realities from around the world and exists at the crossroads of documentary and fiction. Modern Africa — where he lived and worked for a long time (Senegal, Niger, Burundi, Mauritius) — is one of the main sources of inspiration for his books. He translated the essay Decolonising the Mind by Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o (La Fabrique, 2011). His books have been translated into a dozen languages.
In partnership with choreographer Raphaëlle Delaunay, in 2015, he created the two-person show It's a match, presented at several French and international festivals. Working with director Philippe Béziat, he is finishing a film entitled Tout-Puissant Mama Djombo about the exile of Malan Mané, a famous singer from Guinea-Bissau.
The team
Selection Committee
Leonardo Bigazzi has been curator of the Lo Schermo dell’Arte Festival since 2008 and VISIO – European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images since 2012. Since 2020, he has also worked as a curator at the In Between Art Film Foundation, where he is in charge of commissioning and producing artists’ films.
Farah Clémentine Dramani-Issifou is an exhibition curator, planner of film festivals (Critics Week – Cannes Film Festival, Marrakech International Film Festival) and researcher. She is a teacher at HEAD in Geneva. Her research/creative work focuses on cinema and visual arts of the African diaspora.
Mathilde Henrot is the founder of the websites Festival Scope and Festival Scope Pro with Alessandro Raja. She has been planning online and on-site film festivals for many years, including the Sarajevo and Locarno festivals.
Lili Hinstin is a festival planner and artistic director. In charge of cinema at Villa Medici between 2005 and 2009, she became a planner for the Cinéma du Réel festival from 2010 to 2013. Lili Hinstin then became artistic director of the Belfort Film Festival (2013-2018), then of the Locarno International Festival (2018-2020).
Organizing committee
The organizing committee of the Villa Medici Film Festival is composed of Alizée Alexandre (in charge of cultural programming at the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici), Lili Hinstin (festival planner and artistic director), Laurent Perreau (author and director), Sam Stourdzé (director of the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici) and Véronique Terrier Hermann (art historian and planner).
Each year, a selection committee is appointed with the task of selecting films for the competition.
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Photo credits
Cover image: © M3studio
Portrait of Marie Losier: © Bertrand Jacquot
Portrait of Pietro Marcello: © Kris Dewitte
Portrait of Sylvain Prudhomme: © Francesca Mantovani