Pietro Marcello continues his intrepid work along the borderline of fiction and documentary with this beautiful and beguiling film, by turns neorealist and fabulist, worthy of Pasolini in its matter-of-fact lyricism and political conviction. Shot on expired 16mm film stock and freely incorporating archival footage and folkloric tropes, it begins as a portrait of the shepherd Tommaso, a local hero in the Campania region of southern Italy, who volunteered to look after the abandoned Bourbon palace of Carditello despite the state’s apathy and threats from the Mafia. Tommaso suffers a fatal heart attack in the course of shooting, and Marcello’s bold and generous response is to grant his subject’s dying wish: for a Pulcinella straight out of the commedia dell’arte to appear on the scene and rescue a buffalo calf from the palace.
This acclaimed Locarno prizewinner, which had its U.S. premiere in New Directors/New Films 2016, “sets its strange fairy tale into motion with bracing and heedless dedication . . . find[ing] cinematic force in its fanciful telling” (Nicolas Rapold, Film Comment). A documentary that soars into the realm of myth, Marcello’s Lost and Beautiful is a uniquely multifaceted and enormously moving work of political cine-poetry.
2015 | 87m | Italian with English subtitles | Color | DCP | A Grasshopper Film release
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