Montmorency Film

«Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries» is an ‘encyclopaedic’ documentary, whose non-human protagonists tell about us humans. The film is divided into three volumes, each dealing with a single subject: animals, plants, stones. In this tripartite vision, each of its segment is a tribute to a specific genre of documentary filmmaking. Through the three volumes, a single dramaturgical body emerges, that stages a process of admission of responsibility, a process of maintenance and protection, and finally a process of rediscovery of a common and fundamental value: care.

Water, air, earth, fire, ether. Four different stories that tell and show a reaching out towards immortality. We dedicate the element water to immortality in science, that of air to the immortality of art, that of earth to the immortality of faith and that of fire to the immortality of feelings. Ether, linked to the cosmos and the stars, is a tribute to the film industry.

Stonecarvers, masons, carpenters, smiths, electricians, woodworkers, restorers, goldsmiths: the extraordinary, never-ending saga of the fabrication of Milan Cathedral is portrayed in the light of the sacredness of a building that lives through times, rhythms, calendars and aspirations that merge with and transcend the labor of men and women. The anonymous, humble, painstaking everyday care required by a structure such as the Cathedral, over the years and still today, reveals the magnificence of human action that spans time and generations, holding within itself a grand humanist sentiment.

Materia oscura tells the story of a war zone in peacetime. The film location is the Salto di Quirra test range (Sardinia, Italy) where, for over fifty years, governments around the world have tested 'new weapons' and where the Italian government has carried out controlled explosions of old weapon stocks, inexorably endangering the territory.

We are at Niguarda, the most important hospital in Milan that has always been a point of reference for the homeless in the area. Today, the majority of patients are foreigners, to the point that in 2000, the Ethnopsychiatry service was created within the Department of Mental Health. It is here that those without a territorial reference find support within treatment paths. Often these are very vulnerable people, traumatized by the abuse suffered on the journey to Europe. The directors filmed three sessions at different times.

How to film war? «War and Peace» tells the story of the century-old relationship between cinema and war, from the time of their first encounter, way back in 1911 with the Italian invasion of Libya, up to the present day. Forging ahead from the images captured by the pioneers of cinema to today’s twitter feeds, following young soldiers as they are trained to film war, the alliance between cinema and war appears to be a powerful one.

A nocturnal voyage into the bowels of the Earth. The camera follows the work of a machine that is digging tunnels for new underground railway lines. A short film that starts from the darkness to slowly approach the light, when the last fragment of rock falls and the workers’ eternal night comes to an end. A film that shows the inextricable bond between man and machine.