The Spirit of Place: Simone Rapisarda Casanova
Screening Dates
  • January 25, 2019 6:30

“Majestic.”

Melissa Anderson, Village Voice

Part treatise on the spectre of history, part portrait of a vanishing existence, Rapisarda Casanova’s universally acclaimed sophomore feature was the centrepiece of New Directors/​New Films 2015, co-curated by MoMA and Film Society of Lincoln Center. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s heady short story The Aleph, the documentary-fiction hybrid concerns an elderly shepherd whose plot of land in the rugged, remote Apennine mountains of Tuscany—former site of the Gothic Line, a Nazi bulwark during WWII—is up for sale. It’s a region still haunted by traumas of the past, making the property’s prospective buyer, a German, an irony of cosmic (and, no doubt, fictitious) proportions. Rapisarda Casanova, referencing Renaissance aesthetics, paints the movie with natural light and a warm, sfumato palette. The surprise inclusion of a film-within-a-film, shot by partisan re-enactors, is one of many moments of disarming levity in this wise, welcome work. In Italian with English subtitles.

Peter Dickinson, Director of the Institute for Performance Studies – Simon Fraser University, will introduce the screening of La creazione di significato.

Director Simone Rapisarda Casanova will be in attendance.

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