Alberto Grifi (1938–2007) was one of the leading lights of Italian experimental cinema. His pioneering adoption of video in the early 1970s produced some of the decade’s most forward-thinking and challenging works of radical filmmaking. In addition to the newly restored Anna, his portrait of a teenage junkie, there was Lia, a half-hour-long, single-shot record of a woman delivering an impassioned speech against the psychiatric establishment, and Parco Lambro Juvenile Proletariat Festival, a commissioned document of a Woodstock-like music festival that spirals into a full-fledged protest, becoming a reflection on the state of the Italian counterculture. “Grifi,” ran the program notes for a long-awaited retrospective at the Venice Film Festival, “stands for a cinema of constant change, a permanent revolution of vision as well as life, a continuous search for new, meaningful and appropriate forms of togetherness.”

Screening with Lia (Alberto Grifi, 1977, 26m)